


The Secrets We Keep

by in__flux



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Depression, Eating Disorders, Emotional Baggage, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Obsessive-Compulsive, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 39,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/in__flux/pseuds/in__flux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which practically everyone has secrets. Some aren’t pretty, but some are also benign. Half angst and half the mutant baby of crack and fluff. Everyone lives in the Avengers tower, including Thor. Loki also becomes a part of the Avengers later on. Written on the premise that each of the characters are already with each other unless stated.</p><p>Trigger warnings: Mental health issues (OCD, PTSD, and depression), eating disorders, self-injury, self-loathing, internalized homophobia. Clint/Coulson, Tony/Steve/Bruce, Natasha/Pepper, Thor/Loki.</p><p>Non-canon compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Of Washing Hands and Violin Noise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This first chapter deals with Clint. He has OCD, and the /_\ (my own pathetic attempt at a triangle symbol) signals the changeover into the more light-hearted content, where people find out that he plays the violin.

There was a particularly gory mission. Actually, make that very gory. 

Flesh ripping, blood sucking creatures had descended a few blocks down the road from Stark Tower, making it pretty much a bloodbath. They were, in short, huge-ass globs of see-through slime with a ridiculously wide and sharp set of chompers. They moved way too fucking fast and had already killed several civilians before Clint sprinted to the scene, having been closest to the spot at a coffee shop two blocks over. 

The Avengers had to engage in nearly six hours of furious fighting, ducking and weaving and firing their own respective weapons at the creatures that mutated. When they blew a creature into fragments, the fragments would blow up in the span of ten seconds to become another fully functional monster. It was the firefight from hell, complete with regenerating enemies and superheroes who had to figure out a new battle plan every single damn time the gobs of motherfucking slime mutated. 

Finally, Clint and Natasha herded out all the civilians trapped on the ground, and the Hulk rapidly threw together a concrete enclosure ripped from the sidewalk to contain the creatures. The Avengers then took to the skies and high perches and fired superheated bullet after bullet, flaming arrow after arrow, bolts of lightning, chunks and chunks of granite and repulsor blast after blast while Steve, armed with just the one shield, singlehandedly blocked two hundred civilians from all the falling concrete and granite debris dislodged by the ricochet of power from the sky above. 

When the creatures finally dissolved, Clint vaulted the concrete barricade and leaped over dead bodies to the side of a pregnant woman. She was the last to be ingested by the final monster that got thrown into the enclosure, and she was still breathing faintly amidst all the death and carnage around. The blood loss was horrific, but Clint stripped off his uniform and pressed it to her in a valiant attempt to stem the bleeding anyway, because that was his duty. To serve and to protect. And he couldn’t in all good faith just leave her even though it was obvious that she was dying. 

“Thank you, but I know I won’t make it,” she rasped. 

“No,” Clint growled, his teeth grinding together. “You are going to survive. I need paramedics right here, stat!” He yelled, looking around frantically, only to look down again as she weakly tapped at his hands.

“It’s fine. Thank you anyway.” Clint couldn’t move his hands away from the flow of blood. He was still frozen, even as she smiled faintly and her eyes fluttered shut, and as Phil and Natasha gently moved his hands, tugged him to his feet, and led him away, back to SHIELD HQ.

Clint insists that he’s alright and that he’s fine, over and over again. He’s stubborn, and Phil and Natasha both know that he’s not really fine but he just wants to be left alone for now.

Four hours later, Phil enters Clint’s floor in the Avengers tower. He bypasses all the security codes set to maximum and slowly, carefully, looks for Clint. He leaves his shoes on the shoe rack by the door and pads silently through the place in his socked feet. 

He looks in the kitchen first. There’s no sign of Clint, but he knows Clint had been through not too long ago – every countertop is gleaming, the sink has been wiped dry, the dishes are back in the cupboard and the rag clipped right in the middle of the drying rack. It even smells faintly of lemon-scented disinfectant.

He checks the study next. All the books have been carefully arranged in place, sorted by the author’s last name in alphabetical order and by size, and the new designs Clint had been working on for a new weapon have been very meticulously hole punched and filed in a binder. But Clint is nowhere to be seen.

He heads for the bedroom, pokes his head in, and knows that Clint isn’t there. He’s left absolute tidiness in his wake, his walk in closet categorized neatly by colour, material, and occasion on which to wear them, and his bed made military-style. Phil isn’t sure if it’s Clint’s years in the military before coming to SHIELD, or whether it’s just his compulsive need to have all corners straightened out, but at any rate… He shakes his head. He knows where Clint is now.

Sure enough, the sound of flowing water tells him that Clint is indeed in the bathroom. It’s the last stop for his routine - Clint cleans first the kitchen, then tidies all his books, then folds and arranges all his clothes, cleans the toilet and finally washes his hands. Multiple times. Phil knocks on the door and then pushes it open. Shutting the door behind him, he takes a seat on the edge of the (thankfully dry) bathtub and waits.

Clint continues washing his hands and muttering under his breath. “Forty-nine. Palm to palm, one-two-three-four-five. Fingers interlocked, one-two-three-four-five. Right palm to the back of the left, one-two-three-four-five. Now the left palm to the back of the right. One-two-three-four-five. Left thumb. One-two-three-four-five. And the right thumb. One-two-three-four-five. Now scrub the right hand’s fingernails against the left palm…”

Phil can recite the process in his sleep, backwards and forwards and as many times you want. He’s seen Clint do it enough times, especially if the mission was a bloodbath. So he just sits and waits for Clint to be done. Whether the whole routine takes an hour, two hours, or six hours, he will wait for Clint to be done.

Finally, Clint finishes off fifty, and turns with weary eyes and aching body to Phil. Phil leads him out and into the bedroom, where he unfastens Clint’s clothes and folds them neatly, placing them in the laundry hamper. He undresses himself, hangs up the suit (because Clint always insists that he hang it up) and gets them both into bed, under the covers. As he fits his front to the curve of Clint’s back, he hears Clint’s whispered thoughts.

“I couldn’t save her. I should have been faster to get to the scene, faster at thinking of a plan to kill those things, more efficient at keeping the people safe…” Phil takes Clint’s rough hands in his own and caresses his raw, barely scabbed over fingertips, and his heart fucking aches. 

“You did the best you could. It was superb. And that’s more than enough,” he whispers into the ear of the man he loves. He kisses Clint’s neck, then his lips as Clint turns his head to face him. Phil pets Clint’s hair and his cheek with one hand, his other holding Clint to him tightly under the covers, slowly lulling his exhausted, weary lover into rest.

 

/_\

 

There had been a strange occurrence in the Avengers tower. No, make that strange occurrences. Plural.

Whenever it was past two in the morning and one of them was still working in the lab, training somewhere or just not in their beds, JARVIS would prompt them to leave and to go to bed. That was not the unusual occurrence. The out-of-the-norm thing was that usually, JARVIS would stop prompting after the person ignored him or refused to leave thrice. But now, JARVIS would proceed to play difference pieces of violin noise.

It was definitely noise. It wasn’t music or sound produced by a violin – it was carefully written and played, and the string of squawks produced were certainly enough to make the person either grumble and flee, or at least start looking for the noise cancelling Stark-headphones.

What no one could figure out was where the hell JARVIS had gotten his hands on the music.

Bruce never heard it when he was alone. He only heard it when he was in the lab with Tony, because if he was alone, he usually left the lab after thanking JARVIS for reminding him of the time. 

Pepper only heard it once, and that was because Natasha was away. If she was here, Pepper would never have heard it because she would have gotten her to bed by then.

Thor and Steve never heard it because they had the habit of sleeping by eleven.

Clint and Natasha never heard it because JARVIS knew that they could take care of themselves.

Loki and Tony heard it all the time.

Tony recorded the music and ran a cross-reference of the piece against all known sound recordings found on the Internet. It came up negative – obviously it had been written, but never been recorded and put online. 

“JARVIS, tell me where the hell you got that damn piece of noise.”

“Sir, I am unable to tell you.”

“I programmed you, damnit! Now tell me where you got it or else I’m skipping your next few maintenance checks and upgrades.”

“It was produced by a violin, Sir. And you have always performed my maintenance checks regardless of any mitigating circumstances.”

Frustrated, Tony kicked the leg of the table and spent the next minute hopping and swearing before giving up and going to bed.

Then one day, Tony decided to tackle the attic of the previous Stark mansion. He hadn’t had it cleaned out since his parents and Jarvis died, and Pepper had informed him that it was best that he go through it himself as there were supposed to be various valuable items within. Hence, on a rainy Sunday morning, the Avengers and their handler, Coulson, trooped over to the previous Stark mansion to be enveloped in dust clouds and relatively ancient relics.

The mansion’s attic held numerous treasures, including some Picassos, Caravaggios and a Rembrandt. It also held a selection of the early Chanel, Prada and Versace. But the find of the day was a top of the line Stradivarius. Tony had been about to throw it in the junk pile when Clint darted over and snatched it out of his hands.

“What the hell?” Tony yelped in surprise. Clint cradled the dusty case protectively against his chest. 

“This is a Stradivarius,” he snapped, opening it up reverently. And then, for the first time in a very long while, he gasped.

“This is from the golden period,” he breathed, lifting out the original yellowing receipt. The other Avengers heard their exchange and had clustered around the two. With shaking hands, Clint lifted out the violin and the bow. It had been protected well by the case, and still in pretty good condition. He put it to his shoulder and lifted the bow to it.

The music starts out mournful. There is graceful elegance set free in the very way Clint draws the bow across the strings. He is not one of those expressive players who sway and rock from side to side, but his intense concentration and furrowed brow communicate well enough. There were dips and rises and long notes, and the initially mournful tone changed to something hopeful and then to a rapid up-down-up-down slew of notes. Then when everything tapered off in a slow, sweet melody, most of them sighed. Just as they were about to applaud, Clint launched off again into another barrage of fast-paced notes, finally ending the last three notes off with a flourish. Breathing hard, he took a deep bow to the enthusiastic ovation he received.

“You never told us you could play the violin,” Steve ribbed good-naturedly. 

“Man, that violin’s all yours,” Tony exclaimed loudly, moving to clap Clint on the back. Then he froze.

“It was you, wasn’t it? You wrote that devilish piece of squawks that JARVIS insists on playing after two am!” 

“JARVIS said he wanted to torture you. I was only too happy to oblige.” That prompted laughter all around, and Tony eventually gave in and laughed too.

Phil thought he benefited the most from that afternoon. Sure, there were outrageously expensive authentic masterpieces of art and fashion to sell, and Clint got a violin he had never dreamed of owning. But for those few minutes, Phil thought he could see another part of Clint’s soul. 

And he was happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The piece I had in mind when writing Clint's violin solo was something I knew since my childhood, because I starred in a musical with it as the piece played when we take our bows. Being the youngest at 5, I got the sweet, highest part for my bow. 
> 
> Anyway, memories aside, it can be found here:  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEOZ31HeZT4&feature=related


	2. Of Eating Disorders and, Ironically, Cooking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. 524 views, 1 bookmark and 18 kudos for the first chapter alone.
> 
> Even after taking away my own three views away, that's 521! I posted the first chapter, checked back after dinner, and saw 189. Then checked back 21 hours later, and saw 427. Then now it's 524!
> 
> You guys made my day, seriously. I got back my promotional exams results today (failed) and this was honestly the only bright spot of the disastrous today. *hugs even though I'm not a huggy-touchy person*
> 
> So what's different? This time the first piece is almost 3k words! And there are three scenes, which I felt need to be separated. So there's a -+- in between. /_\ still signifies the changeover into the fluff or the happy part, which here is where everyone finds out Phil Coulson is a BAMF who can fucking cook.

Phil has a lot of paperwork.

Not just paperwork, Phil has a shitload of work.

What no one realizes is that Phil’s schedule is already full before he took on the Avengers. He was already busy managing all the equipment and personnel authorization requests, approving mission plans and occasionally going out in the field himself. But then comes the Tesseract, and there’s the Avengers to go with it, and the whole thing just gets dumped on him.

No one realizes that he already has an eighteen-hour work day, and is practically on-call twenty-four seven, seven days a week. Crises don’t come only on weekdays because supervillains aren’t that considerate, and with the Avengers and all the trouble that they cause (and solve), his eighteen-hour work day is sometimes stretched to twenty, twenty one hours. After that, Phil has sometimes been too exhausted to get home and instead barely manages to drag himself over to the very comfortable couch he installed for that purpose.

With the existing hours that he keeps, it’s a wonder that he manages to find the time to eat at all. If not for the business lunches and dinners that he has with associates at least once every two days, he probably would be working his fingers to the bone.

As it is, the business lunches and dinners manage to last him all the way through he’s nearly nine months into managing the Avengers, and almost two months since he finally admitted he had unprofessional feelings for Clint.

He passes out on a mission. He’s right on the street next to the battle scene, fighting with the Avengers. Phil has his own weapons that shoot a varied array of projectiles, depending on the type of thing they’re fighting. He manages to cleanly behead six droids that have their laser sights focused on a group of cowering mothers forming a protective huddle around their children. He uses the megaphone to direct them all to the bomb shelter erected beneath ground twenty metres away, provides them with covering fire, then promptly collapses to the ground once they’re all safely inside.

On the Avenger’s comms, a burst of static nearly deafens them. That’s how they know someone’s down.

“Avengers, check in,” Steve’s authoritative voice sounds over the comms.

“Tony here, well and alive.”

“Natasha.”

“It’s Phil!” Clint all but shrieks into his earpiece. Deep down, he felt a tug at his heart. That strong a burst of static could only have come from one person. Only one person had been holding electronics emitting such a strong signal.

“Thor, present.”

“Hulk,” Bruce growls.

“Clint, we don’t know if it’s Phil yet -” Steve says, only to be interrupted by Clint.

“Give me covering fire,” he yells into the earpiece, then leaps down from his fifteen story perch, rappelling down the ultra-strong wire Tony had specially made for him. Dashing across the street, he slings Phil’s limp body over his shoulder and makes for the bomb shelter.

When he gets there, he lays Phil down on the gurney the paramedics have set up in the makeshift first aid corner. He rips open his suit and stares, in shock.

He and Phil have never fucked. That’s surprising, but not nearly as surprising as the sight of Phil. They haven’t had time to undress completely for nearly a month, but Clint did realize that Phil’s hipbones felt more prominent the last time he sucked him off. But Phil had lost quite a fair bit of flesh and muscle. When they first (embarrassingly) rutted against each other, Clint remembered gripping and running his hands desperately over Phil’s sculpted biceps and muscled thighs. But now, Phil had the lean physique of a runner. He still had muscle, but there was a startling lack of bulk.

“What’s the problem? Where’s your guy hit?” The paramedic asked, flinging open his field pack.

“Nowhere,” Clint said, forcing his slack jaw to work.

“Get an IV drip in him. He’s overworked, that’s all.” He smoothed his fingers through Phil’s hair and dropped a lingering kiss on his lips, then ran back out onto the street to continue fighting.

-+-

Phil gradually came back to consciousness. Strangely enough, he seemed to be lying on a flat, cushy surface. He mentally catalogued his surroundings. It was relatively quiet, but there were many people running about outside. There was a rhythmic, slow beep, and something seemed stuck into the back of his right hand. He was covered in something soft and very familiar – actually it felt like his blanket. Certain that his captors had sufficient intelligence to even lull him into a false sense of security with a blanket made of the very material his own was, he groggily moved to pull out whatever was dripping into his bloodstream through his right hand.

Then a warm, rough hand closed around his, and he nearly died of the familiarity and heartache as he heard Clint say, “Phil.”

“They got you too?” He whispered, throat dry, heart pounding in fear. Not only was he captured, Clint was too. This was terrible. And they even put him on a comfortable surface and put Clint in with him. This could only be the precursor to torture.

“You’re in SHIELD’s infirmary, you dumbass,” Clint said, a raw edge in his voice that Phil had never heard before.

“You collapsed in the middle of the mission. At first I thought a droid got you, but when I got you to the paramedics in the bomb shelter I felt like I got hit instead. You lost… God, I don’t even know how much! I ripped open your suit and was looking for a wound, but instead I…” Clint is silent as he presses Phil’s hand to his lips. Finally, he draws a breath and continues.

“You lost a lot of muscle,” he manages to get out, and Clint can feel his own heart leaking the tears that he refuses to let his own estuary glands release.

“I remember when we first… Well, that first time against your office wall. Your arms and your thighs felt similarly muscled to mine, y’know, with muscle, and not just… You look fucking skeletal compared to then, okay? And the doctors, they’re saying that you starved yourself, and… How the fuck could I have let this happen? I mean, we haven’t had the time to be naked completely, but I still should have realized…” Clint is cut off by Phil squeezing his hand.

“Water,” Phil croaks. Clint hurriedly moves to grab a cup out of the cooler sitting on the bedside table in lieu of flowers. Natasha had mixed a high calorie, electrolyte drink and frozen it in red plastic cups. Chipping off a piece with a teaspoon, Clint carefully spoons it into Phil’s mouth, again and again, until Phil squeezes his hand again, telling him to stop.

“I didn’t starve myself,” Phil said in confusion.

“So how the fuck do you explain the huge muscle loss? The body metabolizes muscle when there’s a lack of calories, that’s what the doctors told me. They’re… They were going to diagnose you with anorexia.” Clint’s voice broke and he buried his forehead into Phil’s shoulder. Slowly, Phil brought his other hand up and tangled his fingers into Clint’s short hair, gently rubbing his scalp.

“I haven’t had the time to eat,” Phil confessed. “I… Clint, I was already working eighteen-hour days before I took on handling the Avengers.” Clint jerks his head up to stare at Phil.

“How long has this been going on? For the whole nine months since the Avengers were formed?”

“Well, yes -”

“Phil, I’m so sorry,” Clint murmured.

“It’s not your fault,” Phil reassured, but Clint spent the next few minutes apologizing for not realizing that Phil had too much work, for not noticing that Phil had lost a significant amount of his muscle mass, for not making Phil eat, for everything that he had ever done that had hurt Phil. Phil let Clint do it, his heart aching from his own guilt at letting his own actions hurt the man who was currently saying everything twice softly in his ear.

-+-

Two days later, Phil was out of the infirmary, with a strict diet plan drawn up by Bruce, all his belongings and a new huge bed installed in Clint’s floor of the tower, and a week’s worth of sick leave.

While Bruce was busy explaining the nutritional properties of the food that he had put in the diet plan, and showing Phil where to find them in the kitchen, Steve, Tony, Clint, Natasha and Thor formed a fearsome squad of five and led the charge down to Fury’s office. With Clint and Natasha leading at the front, and Tony, Steve and Thor bringing up the rear, agents scattered out of their way as they marched down the corridors.

Clint slammed open the door of Fury’s office, and Thor and Steve moved swiftly to capture Nick Fury. They each held one arm behind his back, and pinned down his legs with a boot on each thigh. Natasha marched up, slapped down a single photo, and stared intensely at him.

“Look. At. Phil,” she enunciated sharply. “He has lost such a large proportion of muscle mass that it’s starkly visible to the naked eye. Look!” She hissed the last word, allowing a speck of spit to fly into his uncovered eye. With a great deal of self-control, he resisted the urge to get free of the two superheroes and spit back. Fury blinked the irritation away and slowly craned his head downwards to look at the photo.

The photo was taken when Phil was still unconscious. Hooked up to an IV, with numerous lines and wires snaking their way from various points on his body to transmit information to the bevy of monitors around his bed, he looked frail and fragile. Phil had lost muscle to the point that had he been an average man on the street, he would already have looked like an Auschwitz survivor.

“And this is because of what you did,” Natasha spat. Fury was not a stupid man. He knew that this was because he pushed a huge load over to Phil, and took advantage of Phil’s scrupulous and meticulous nature to ensure that it was all done. He lifted his head slowly and regarded her, eye blazing. But this was where Clint came in.

Clint stepped to the front of the room, his own bow cocked with an arrow pointing dead centre at Fury’s one remaining eye.

“This is what you are going to do,” he said softly. Despite volume, Clint’s tone was menacing and carried more than a promise of the threat he was physically embodying.

“You are going to re-evaluate every. Single. Fucking. Thing. That Phil has to do. You are going to reassign his caseload, and make sure that he has sufficient downtime in between field ops and missions with the Avengers, just like the rest of us do. You are going to schedule him regular hours to eat, to sleep, to train, and to work just like the rest of us have. Phil is not a second class agent. He should be treated just like the rest of us.”

Fury opened his mouth, but no one knows whether it was to protest or to acquiesce, because the moment that he did, the rest of the Avengers had their own weapons trained on him. Natasha whipped out her gun and threw her knife expertly into the frame of the chair, pinning his suit to the wood but barely missing his flesh. Tony had his repulsor jets fired up and pointed at his head, Steve had a pistol to his head, and Thor had Mjolnir planted in the middle of the table.

“Without Phil, you can forget about the Avengers Initiative, Fury.” Steve calmly said.

It was the first time Steve did not address Fury with Director Fury.

“If you’ve got it, nod,” Tony said curtly.

Fury could do naught but nod.

They retrieved and powered down their weapons, and collectively stormed out of Fury’s office.

-+-

“Phi-il,” Clint sang loudly, out of tune, as he pushed aside a ceiling panel and dropped nimbly to his feet next to Phil. Turning to his lover, he brandished two brown bags.

“Time for lunch!” With a faint smile, Phil began tidying up the paperwork and spreading newspaper across the table to let Clint lay out the food. There was quite a fair bit today, fresh from the deli down the street which was only too happy to supply food to the Avengers whenever and wherever they needed it. Clint put out containers of fresh tomato soup, roasted chicken sandwiches, and two cups of hot tea, laid out the cutlery, and stood behind Phil to lovingly tuck the napkin into his shirt. Phil waited until Clint had seated himself on the other side of the table before sighing.

“Clint, you know I can’t finish my half,” he groaned.

“I know,” Clint replied. “I’m not expecting you to.”

“So why did you purchase an adult sized portion for me? You know that you could just get a child’s meal and I would eat it. Even if it had shaped nuggets and vegetables in the shape of a smiley face.”

Unspoken, the “just because I love you and want to make you happy” lingered in the air between the two. It wasn’t too far from “because I don’t want to see you that hurt ever again”, which was what Clint knew Phil also meant.

“Because you’re an adult,” Clint replied seriously. “And also because that means that you should be able to measure how much you’re eating in proportion to what a normal adult eats.” He leaned over the table and pressed a quick kiss to Phil’s lips, then sat back down.

Silently, both of them began eating their food.

Most adults had a conversation during meal times, but they didn’t. Clint knew that if Phil and he talked, it would take them a longer time and it might even make Phil eat less before his brain felt that he was full. Also, he hoped that one day he would be able to get over his own rather irrational fear that Phil was delaying the process of eating. Which was an entirely unfounded fear because Phil genuinely didn’t realize that he was losing weight at an unhealthy rate because he was skipping meals, and his weight loss wasn't a result of Phil consciously refusing to eat.

Before long, Phil set down the remains of his sandwich. They had both finished at the same time, not because they were consciously timing it, but because Phil simply ate at a slower rate. If he ate any faster, the sudden influx of food would probably cause his stomach to rebel and undo all his efforts.

Phil allowed a small groan to slip out. He was, after all, alone with the man he loved. With the man he planned to spend the rest of his life with. Well, also because he had hit the button to activate the soundproofing barrier and illusion hologram Tony had installed for him. Now, no one outside knew that he was inside with Clint – all they saw was him studiously working away, with the regular typing and paper shuffling sounds to boot.

“Does it hurt?” Clint immediately asked.

He stood up, went around the back of Phil’s chair, and tugged him to his feet. Clint removed Phil’s suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, neatly. Partly because he couldn’t see it wrinkled, and Phil couldn’t stand creases in his suit too.

Leading him over to the couch, he sat down first and then guided Phil to sit down and lean against his own chest, ensuring that Phil was nearly upright to avoid heartburn. He loosened Phil’s tie and gently placed his own warm hand just below his chest. Clint hoped the slow, circular motions would soothe the discomfort he knew Phil was feeling. Regular portions and re-feeding tended to do that to a person. Phil’s stomach wasn’t able to digest regular portions very well, and he even had trouble with smaller portions, mainly because the time given for him to digest before the next meal was shortened quite a fair bit. It wasn’t his fault, of course, but whether or not it was his fault, Clint and Phil both knew it would take time, a lot of adjusting and discomfort, and physical training before Phil was back to his previous state.

Before long, Phil put his hand over Clint’s to still the comforting motion. Clint dropped a kiss into the agent’s hair, then swooped down for a peck on the mouth.

“I have to get back to work, but thank you for the lovely lunch,” Phil said quietly. Slowly, they stood up and cleared up the remains of lunch and tossed it into the concealed incinerator behind Phil’s photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge on the wall.

As Clint climbed up a rope into the ceiling duct, Phil put his jacket back on and fixed his tie. Then, he hit the button once again and there was a slight shimmer around his glass office walls and the people outside could once again see what Phil really was doing inside.

Phil knew that as long as he was able, Clint would bring him lunch and sit with him to eat. He knew that Clint would always be there for him, with him, every single step of this damn journey, for the rest of their lives.

 

/_\

 

There’s an invitation for each of the Avengers.

Clint finds his on his side of the bed, Natasha finds hers folded into her ammunition pouch, and Steve finds his tucked, ironically in the crotch of the pants he sent for laundering. Tony and Bruce get an identical invitation with both their names, placed prominently in the centre of both labs such that neither of them can miss it. Pepper finds her computer wallpaper changed to the invitation card. And the next time Thor comes to Avenger tower, Phil makes sure to hand him the card in person. Just in case, anyway.

The card is in a deep navy blue, embossed with beautiful gold calligraphy, inviting them to dinner at seven in the evening for that Friday. It’s no secret that Phil Coulson is the mastermind behind it; after all, the card reads “Phil Coulson would like to invite you to”.

What none of them know is what exactly is going on and why Phil is going to the trouble of catering for a dinner for them.

So anyway, they all troop into the kitchen dressed in the usual garb they wear around the tower, and they all promptly stop short and gawp.

What Phil has done is nothing short of a work of art. The chairs have all been repaired from the last time someone made coffee so acidic it burnt a hole through two of the chairs, and all polished to a shiny wooden sheen. It actually looks like the mahogany it is for once. There are navy seat cushions and a deep cobalt table cloth, and atop the table are shimmering gold placemats and the good silver that Tony hasn’t seen since his childhood. There are even little white cards with their names, telling them which seat is theirs.

But the stunner is Phil himself, dressed impeccably as usual in one of his numerous suits, complete with a chef’s apron tied around his waist and a chef’s hat.

Once they’re all seated and their mouths all shut, Phil turns to them.

“For the first course, we’ll be having amuse bouche. It’s a single, bite-sized hors d'œuvre, and I’ve prepared cornets of salmon tarte in a savoury, edible cone.”

The evening goes on and on, past the appetisers, salad and exceptional Shrimp Bisque Flambe. Phil looks just a little proud, as he directs Tony’s robots in clearing away the dishes and cutlery from his refreshing, hand-churned Grapefruit and Mint sorbet, and brings in the main course – baked salmon roulade.

“I spent a little time modifying the tomato beurre blanc sauce so that it tasted just like the version with the alcohol even though I took it out,” he comments lightly as Tony looks at him with newfound admiration and gratitude.

All too soon, the eight-course dinner concludes after soufflés and a lovely decaf latte, and the Avengers are all complimenting Phil for a meal exceedingly well prepared.

“I did not know you could prepare such a sumptuous feast,” Thor proclaims. His back slap is still careful, as he now knows that Phil has not regained all that he once had before, and could pitch forward at his well-intentioned gesture. Eventually, after they’ve all thanked Phil thoroughly and declared their own astonishment at his cooking skills, they leave, and Clint and Phil are once more alone.

“At least you ate some of it,” Clint breathes, before stealing Phil’s mouth in a kiss. True enough, Phil had sat down to eat with the rest of them, ensuring that he had a meal at the proper time. Clint’s hands briefly pause at Phil’s abdomen, a lingering question left unasked. Phil’s hands guide his down, past his navel, and right into his waistband.

“The doctors cleared me for sex today,” he says in between Clint’s pants and gasps as he nips and suckles at his neck, hands roving hungrily across Clint’s chest. “I can finally afford the calorie loss.”

“That’s great,” Clint chokes out, and leaves the robots behind to clear up the mess while he and Phil half-walk, half-stumble and half-manoeuvre each other into their shared bedroom.

Today is definitely cause for celebration.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not a chef, so the recipe for dinner was stolen shamelessly from: http://www.finedinings.com/menuideassalmon.htm
> 
> Once again, thank you for making my day, and see you all in the next chapter!


	3. Of AA, Antacids, and Children

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow 1022 views!! This has brightened my day.
> 
> Okay, so -+- still stands for a scene change, and /_\ still stands for a plot changeover into the happier secret. But there's a new one, /+\, which is where... Well, Bruce and Steve both find out about Tony's alcoholic secret, but there's something else Tony's hiding. So /+\ denotes where it's Bruce's turn to find out things.
> 
> I'm not very satisfied with this chapter. I feel like somehow the writing deproved, but I can't figure out why or how to make it change. So maybe if you find something you don't like, do feel free to review or something.

After Phil prepared that spectacular dinner for the Avengers, Steve overheard a strange conversation a few days later.

“Hey, Phil,” Tony began, casually leaning against the doorframe of his glass office. Steve was nearby – right next door, actually, with Maria Hill. He was helping her with some heavy lifting because Fury had given her a bonus and she decided to change some of her office furniture.

“I never really figured out why you cooked us all that dinner. Was it to say thanks for our part in making sure you got over, y’know, the eating thing?” Phil suppressed a snort. In signature Tony Stark style, Tony had managed to both conceal his own awkwardness at approaching a man he had never conversed socially with before, bring up a touchy topic, and soothe any possible ruffled feathers all at once. Phil knew that Tony knew exactly why he did it, but he went along and nodded anyway.

“So, anyway, I’d like that recipe that you said you managed to make non-alcoholic. I’d like to adapt it for other recipes that require alcohol…” At this point, Tony walked in and closed the door, so Steve couldn’t “accidentally overhear” anything else.

Why on earth did Tony want that recipe?

-+-

“Miss Pepper?” Steve, polite as always, knocked on Pepper’s open office door.

“Yes, Steve?” She smiled warmly. 

“I… Well, today I was in SHIELD HQ, helping Agent Hill with her new office furniture, and what happened was that I, well, accidentally overheard Tony asking Phil for the recipe that he used to make the salmon dish that he did during the dinner he prepared for us. I think he wanted to prepare other dishes that used alcohol, but didn’t want to use the alcohol? And I can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

“Steve…” Pepper paused. She could see how earnestly baffled Steve was, but she knew she couldn’t just tell him.

“Tony doesn’t do too well with alcohol,” she finally said. “But I can’t tell you any more than that. It’s best you ask him yourself.”

 

-+-

Tony froze.

“Steve, tell me you did not eavesdrop on my conversation with Phil.” Tony’s hand wouldn’t move from where it was positioned on what looked like very complicated circuitry. Surrounded by bits and pieces of hard metal casing, Tony suddenly looked lost, and very, very small.

“I couldn’t help overhearing it, I’m sorry!” Steve said, frantically trying to backpedal. 

“So I went to Pepper and asked her, and she just said that you didn’t do too well with alcohol, and to ask you. So I started thinking, and I realised that when we first came, you drank almost all the time, and the lab had alcohol fumes, for heaven’s sake! But I haven’t seen you drink in quite a few months now, and I remember this really rough patch a few months ago when you shut yourself in your lab with coffee and Red Bull and wouldn’t come out for a week, so I put the pieces together…” 

Steve had come to the logical conclusion that Tony had been an alcoholic. 

Unfortunately, it was true.

“It’s true,” Tony said, his voice nearly inaudible as he stood stock still amidst the trappings for a new robot. Steve just stared at him, until Tony finally fished out a key ring from his pocket. At first, Steve didn’t comprehend why Tony was carrying around a key ring. After all, the tower operated on iris and fingerprint scans and a voice recognition program personally overseen by JARVIS. Then Tony tossed it to him and he saw a logo that he’d only seen a handful of times since the organisation was first set up.

It said “Congratulations on being six months sober!”, with the Alcoholics Anonymous logo smack in the centre. 

Tony was still looking down at his unassembled robot, his face flushed with shame. 

“Tony, this… I’m proud of you,” Steve said. “I might have been frozen in the forties when Alcoholics Anonymous had only been around for a few years, and back then, mental illness and substance addiction was a taboo, but I still think you must have your reasons for, you know, wanting to turn to alcohol in the first place.”

Tony lifted his head up, not quite comprehending or believing what he was hearing. He had denied that he had a problem for many years, until three months into the formation of the Avengers. That was when he realised that he actually liked Steve and didn’t actually hate him, despite all his pre-conceived notions and bitterness at his father’s constant comparisons and reminiscing about the halcyon days with Captain America right by his side. Even though he never thought that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting together with Steve, Pepper had hauled him to an AA meeting and threatened to burn down his lab if he didn’t commit to getting sober. So he cleaned up his act, and it wasn’t long after before Steve came into his lab, quietly kissed him, and left. That was the beginning of their currently two-month old relationship.

“I want to know everything about you,” Steve said, clambering into the middle of the mess and crushing Tony tightly to his chest. 

“I want to know what Howard was like to you, why you never bring him up, and what on earth made you think that alcohol was the solution to all the things that you felt. I already know what you look like in the morning and how hot your face looks when you cum.” Steve blushed, but continued anyway. “I want to know all the demons in your past and the skeletons in your closet, and it doesn’t matter how horrific it is. I want my heart to know you, and to ache for you because of all the things that you went through and because it can’t cope with how much I love you.”

Tony would deny it to his dying day, but he was never more grateful for Steve’s arms around him as he finally shed the last vestiges of his stained past.

/+\

So Bruce and Tony are happily creating chaos and trouble in the lab, and then it all goes to hell. It all goes to hell in a goddamn hand basket.

It starts when Bruce finds a suspicious box. It’s funnily dirty – some parts are dirty, some parts are oddly clean, and it shakes and rattles when he extends a cautious foot to poke at it.

“Tony,” he calls across the place. “What’s this box?” 

So maybe Tony’s frozen expression and then his subsequent “Oh GOD NO don’t touch that it’s mine” clued him in. But anyway, he snatched up the box and darted to the far end of the lab. 

“Bruce, that’s mine,” Tony shouted, sprinting over. But it was too late.

At first, Bruce didn’t know the significance of what he was looking at. There were bottles and boxes of Kaopectate, Tums, Rolaid, Pepto-Bismol, Milk of Magnesia… Bruce couldn’t make the link between Tony’s apparent need to conceal whatever was in the box and its contents. It wasn’t as if it contained a decomposing skull or a secret collection of something embarrassing… Oh. Then it clicked. 

Tony once said he found admitting that he was in pain to be embarrassing. Oh. OH. 

“Tony,” he said, concern making his pitch rise slightly. He hefted the box in one hand and took a few steps towards Tony. 

“Tony, why do you need so many antacids?” Tony shrugged, looked around shiftily and proceeded to try grabbing the box. Bruce was having none of it, though. He stared at Tony, only for Tony to turn on his heel and go right back to what he was working on.

“Hey! Tony!” Then, Bruce saw Tony lift his coffee cup to his lips, and it all clicked.

“You get gastric pains from all that blasted coffee and all the stress, right? Why are you still drinking coffee? You should stop before you get an ulcer, you silly man - ” Bruce shut up abruptly as Tony turned back around, snatched the box, muttered something too quietly for him to hear, and quickly went back to his work.

“What?” 

“I said, that’s true, but it’s better than alcohol,” Tony repeated, this time only slightly louder. Bruce caught it anyway, and physically reached out to turn Tony so that they were both eye to eye.

“I know you were an alcoholic, Tony,” Bruce said, his hands gripping Tony’s shoulders. “I know you had a problem, but I noticed that six months ago you stopped drinking. It’s not something to be ashamed of, we all have our own secrets that we don’t want others to know about, but you’re admirable, Tony. It’s definitely hard to beat an addiction.” For the span of that moment, Bruce’s eyes met Tony’s. Sincerity flowed from Bruce, and Tony had to fight to keep his eyes on Bruce’s. Admitting that he was a recovering alcoholic was no easier the second time round.

Then Bruce leaned in and lightly kissed Tony on the mouth.

“Fuck!” Bruce leapt back and swore, holding a hand to his own lips. “Fuck, damnit, I’m so sorry, Tony! I know, you and Steve, but, I don’t know what I was thinking! Forget that ever, ever happened!”

Tony caught Bruce’s arm, and kissed him back.

-+-

“No coffee for you, Tony,” Steve says, his head resting on Tony’s where they’re both standing in the kitchen, and his big hand comes right out and puts Tony’s cup out of his reach. Tony pouts, but Bruce pours him a cup of his own special blend of tea and says, “You can have this cup of tea instead.” 

So Tony takes his cup of tea, and let’s Steve’s warm roving hands remind him that he’s going cold turkey from coffee and antacids, if only to wean himself off another destructive habit that’s destroying his stomach instead of his liver. Of course, it’s also to put an end to the pain-filled nights that he spends desperately clawing for the box of antacids that’s not there because he’s already taken the maximum recommended dose. Instead of just indiscriminately popping pills or chugging down liquid medication, he spends those nights being held tightly between Steve and Bruce in their huge, brand new bed. 

So Tony drinks his tea, looks at Bruce preparing breakfast and Steve holding him from behind, and the world is upright once again. 

 

/_\

 

So all of them are taking a stroll in the park, and the ridiculous thing is that it starts happening right when they walk by that bench.

There’s a baby in the pram, and a little boy sitting by the pram. The baby started to squall just as they went by, and as they turn collectively back to look, the little boy seems to be screwing up his face in preparation to let out a loud cry of his own. 

Funnily enough, it’s not Pepper who immediately heads towards the boy. It’s not Natasha. That defies all gender stereotypes already, but anyway, it’s Tony. Tony breaks from their row and quickly strides (because he’s Tony and he’s too cool to run) back to the bench. He sits down next to the little boy and speaks with him for a moment, then reaches into the bottom compartment of the pram, dangles his hand into the contraption and continues speaking. Miraculously, the baby shuts right up, and the little boy is now talking at what seems like a breakneck speed.

The Avengers troop back and stand in a wary semi-circle around Tony, and eavesdrop on the conversation. 

“So my mommy told me to take my sister and go find a bench in the park, because she had a business call to make, but now she’s been gone a long time and I don’t know where she is!”

“Easy, kiddo. Tell me what your mommy looks like - her hair colour, what she’s wearing - and I’ll help you find her.”

“She’s got brown hair, like darker then mine. She’s taller than you, but she’s wearing these funny tall shoes and she’s wearing a red shirt and a black skirt.” Tony coolly turns around to give a meaningful look at the Avengers, which they all interpret as “Hey, go help this poor kid find his momma.” Meanwhile, he turns back to the kid, and they continue talking. Amusingly enough, the boy’s favourite superhero is Iron Man himself.

Phil bends down and looks at the boy’s shoes, and the pram’s wheels, then turns to brief the Avengers.

“There’s traces of red mud on the wheels and the shoes,” he says, slipping easily into his authoritative tone. “That’s only found on the east side of this park. We’ll head in that direction and split up to search. Text me if you find the woman.”

When they victoriously head back all the way across the park with the frantic woman in tow, it’s to find the little boy lying down on the bench with his head in Tony’s lap, pointing out funny shapes in the clouds. And, horrors of horrors, Tony has a thermos of hot water, a container of milk powder, and the baby suckling on a bottle in his arms. He’s feeding the infant, and conversing with the child, and what on earth is this, because no one knew Tony could talk to anyone normally outside of the lab.

There’s a touching reunion between the boy and his mother, and she relieves Tony of the bundle in his arms. She starts to wail again when he lets go, but he touches her nose with the tip of his finger and makes her laugh at his funny face, and it’s a very bemused group of Avengers that eventually leave the park.

“So we never knew you were good with children,” Natasha finally says. They laugh, but Tony simply raises his eyebrow and proclaims that he is a man of many talents, which includes taking care of children and sucking out Steve’s and Bruce’s brains through their cocks. They blush and simultaneously punch his biceps, and Tony pretends to moan and stagger as they head back towards Avenger Tower.

All in all, it was not too bad for a Saturday afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter's Steve! 
> 
> (I think my problem is that I don't know how to write some characters. Or some problems.)


	4. Of the Previous Self and Balls of Wool

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep getting mindfucked every time I open the 'my home' bit on archive to check on my baby (this story), and seeing the growing number of hits. As the number has gone right past 1k and hit 1.5k, I'm happy that this is getting such attention. I never dreamt that the number of hits would even rise past 100 or so.
> 
> Okay, so this chapter is quite a bit shorter. It's only about 1.5k words. And it felt kinda odd trying to get that out, it feels as though it's a little awkward. Sorry about that *bricked* In my own admittedly not-an-excuse-defence, this week has gotten progressively worse from Monday to now, which is Wednesday. 
> 
> Anyway, this chapter features Tony and Bruce finding out that Steve detests his pre-serum self, and the Avengers finding out that he knits.

Tony and Bruce agree that it’s Steve Night.

Basically, they agree that tonight they’re going to ravish Steve.

So they waylay him as he’s coming out of the shower after sparring with Thor in the ring.

Bruce kisses him first, while Tony surreptitiously shoves his hand down Steve’s exercise shorts, eliciting a moan. It isn’t hard to get Steve up to their bedroom between the two of them, unless you count walking with an erection to be hard. 

Tony pushes Steve down on the bed, while Bruce slides his shorts off him.

“Bet you never had action like this before the serum,” Tony says in jest, moving his mouth to nip at Steve’s neck. None of them are prepared for Steve’s reaction. He makes a broken-hearted whimper, sits up abruptly, then bolts for the bathroom. Tony is frozen for a few seconds before he forces his legs to move past the goddamn guilt coursing through his veins and he pounds on the bathroom door. 

“Steve? I’m sorry, damnit! I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry!” Tony slams his fist against the door, but all he hears is a thump against the other side of the door, and Steve quietly sniffing. 

“Please, I’m really sorry,” Tony pleads. He crumples against the door, and oh god why did he even decide to open his fucking big mouth when he’s already given his heart away to two wonderful men. Bruce comes over and silently sits next to him, slinging an arm around Tony’s shoulder. 

“I fucked up big time, didn’t I,” Tony asks bitterly. He’s never hated himself more than he does in this moment, and he can fucking feel his heart aching. Bruce squeezes his shoulder.

“Steve will open that door later,” he says, voice low in Tony’s ear. “He loves both of us, and he knows you didn’t mean to hurt him. You didn’t mean to trigger him, but you didn’t know that it was a trigger, and Steve knows that. We’ll just wait here for him, okay?” The world isn’t alright, there’s water all around. Or is that just tears in Tony’s eyes? He swipes a hand across his eyes and leans his head against Bruce’s shoulder.

Fuck.

-+-

Steve opens the door. It feels like fucking hours have passed, and Tony’s heart is still fucking hurting from the damn guilt and regret and all, but Steve opened the door. It’s just that Bruce and Tony were leaning against the door, and they kinda fall against Steve’s massive feet. They’re all frozen for a few seconds, but it’s still damn funny, so they all break out into laughter after those seconds pass. Steve offers his hands to Bruce and Tony, and tug them to their feet. Bruce sits them down in the kitchenette and fixes them all mugs of hot chocolate with tiny fluffy marshmallows floating on top, just the way Steve described having on rainy days in his childhood with his mother. They’re about halfway through the cups when Tony finally lifts his head to look at Steve.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Oh god look at his eyes don’t look at his lips where he has an adorable chocolate and cream moustache and don’t lick it off, he firmly hammers into his mind. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says tremulously, his voice wavering, and right there he seems like he’s falling apart. “It’s not your fault.” He reaches his arms out to both of them, and instantly Tony leaps out of his seat and moulds himself to Steve. Bruce follows at a more sedate pace, and adds his own arms to the tangle. His voice now muffled and wrapped up in warmth, Steve continues.

“I… I really hate who I was before the serum,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t hate myself when I was still that sickly and weak and…” Steve lets his voice trail off, obvious self-censoring because he didn’t want to hurt them any further with what he thought of his previous self, but the feeling is evident in his words and his tone of voice. He presses his lips to Bruce’s hair, to Tony’s hair, and presses on.

“After the serum, I burnt all my copies of the pictures of me before the transformation. I couldn’t stand to look at myself. I only let my mother keep the originals. I shouldn’t have reacted so badly, and I’m sorry for hurting you with my reaction, but…” Bruce breaks in, his hand reaching up to frame Steve’s jaw.

“Steve, some things haven’t changed since the transformation -”

“No, everything changed, that’s why I hate who I was before -”

“Steve, what didn’t change was what was inside of you. You’re brave, kind, smart, you care about people and you try to help them whether or not you can. You lead people. All that was there, inside your heart, before the serum.”

“And we’d still love you,” Tony interjects. “We’d still love you whether or not there’s the serum.”

“We love you not just because of your body. We love your heart.” 

“I – I never imagined that someone would say that, because – because I never thought that someone would love me as I was! I never dreamt of love before, because I never thought someone would reciprocate…” 

Tony grabbed his head and pulled him down, mashing his lips fervently to his, then Bruce cupped Steve’s head gently and softly pressed his own mouth to Steve’s. Steve felt an overflow of absolute warmth, love and affection flowing from the two of them, washing over him and seeping and diffusing into his pores. It made him cry again, his tears running down the strong line of his jaw and dripping into Tony’s and Bruce’s faces, as both of them kissed his neck, his face, his mouth, his collarbone…

And all was well, because the tears were like some exorcism and a balm all at the same time, soothing all their hurts and fears and worries, and replacing it with nothing but the aching feeling of being awash in love.

/_\

Once again, there are strange happenings in Avengers Tower. 

There are mysterious deliveries of cartons and cartons of balls of wool, and a various assortment of knitting needles arrives one day. No one knows who it’s for, because when they all troop out to see the delivery, no one claims that it’s theirs. Yet two hours later, it disappears from the lobby, and JARVIS is strangely uncooperative when Tony requests for the security camera footage.

So someone is knitting, but no one knows who it is.

Then, new things start appearing.

The sofa in the living room suddenly has new cushion covers. Mug warmers appear for each of them, with a special emblem embroidered on. Tony’s has his faceplate, Thor’s has Mjolnir, Bruce has a smiley Hulk face, Natasha’s has a ninja with red hair and Pepper’s has a red headed little girl, Phil has a pair of sunglasses, and Clint’s has a bow and arrow. Steve didn’t forget himself; his own mug warmer has his shield. The stitching is fine and delicate, and clearly done by someone with a skilled hand. Also, clearly someone with a lot of time.

It all comes to light on Christmas Day, because when they tear into their packages, it’s pretty obvious. They all have knitted gifts all around, and the only person without is Steve.

“Steve!” Pepper turns to him and exclaims. “You never told us you could knit!” 

Steve scratches the back of his head, sheepishly. His face warms and he feels the telltale blush coming on.

“I was sick a lot as a kid,” he says. “So I was stuck at home and my mother taught me how to knit and sew.” 

“This is wonderful,” she gushes. “Can you teach me? Please?” Steve, ever polite and unassuming, turns a darker shade of red. 

“Sure,” he squeaks. “Though it’s not that much of a skill…”

“Nonsense,” he hears Tony say firmly. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Bruce and I have to find out how far down that blush goes.” Steve squawks, but he lets Tony drag him out of the room anyway. Bruce, who had also began imitating a tomato at Tony’s suggestive comment, shakes his head, excuses himself and turns to go after the two.

-+-

Lying there in the sleepy post-coital afterglow, Bruce puts his hand on Steve’s broad chest.

“You handled that quite well,” he murmurs. 

“I don’t hate my previous self that much anymore,” Steve admits, abashed. He’s a little anxious and a little proud all at the same time, and his face is an open book. “I have things that I liked back then too. I learnt to draw and to knit, and I would never have done that if I hadn’t been inside most of the time. And, like both of you said, my heart hasn’t changed.”

“You certainly deserve a reward,” Tony says wickedly, and moves his mouth down to Steve’s cock, lazily mouthing at it. Bruce and Steve both laugh, and Tony smiles up at them, careful not to let his teeth graze the sensitive flesh. And in that moment, the world could fall down around them, but they would be too wrapped up in each other to notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter features Bruce and his secret. See you all soon!


	5. Of Hurting Yourself and Sewing Yourself Some Clothes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The people around me were annoying today. I don't like being around people, generally, and I don't like people touching me (except for a few select people). That's me for you. But my mood kept on improving as I checked back sporadically for the number of views and kudos! It already is beyond anything I would ever expect, and is somewhat like what I dream of achieving one day. I dream of one day being rec-ed on someone's rec list, somewhere.
> 
> So...
> 
> Long chapter is long. This is almost 3.5k words, and about 2.9k is concentrated in the first angst-y part.
> 
> This part was semi-cathartic to write. I'm using my own experience and my own skin (well, part of it, anyway) to churn out this monster. It's a little late tonight - I wrote only about 1.8k in class. I was planning to capitalize on the long hours of supposed project work to finish it, but my noisy classmates kept interrupting and being their irritating, noisy selves while I was in the zone. So I finished it while sitting at Subway having dinner.
> 
> Same symbols apply: -+- is a change of scene, /_\ is the change over into the light hearted secret.
> 
> Anyway, I hope this is enjoyable!

“Traaaaaaaain!!!” Tony shrieks into his earpiece, and they all look up from where they’re defending various buildings to see a huge ass goddamn fucking train hurtling through the sky and the clouds, about to smash into the street. Thor and Tony take to the skies to try and push the damn thing backwards, into whichever gaping hole in the sky it came from, while the rest take over their vacated battle zones and simultaneously provide covering fire.

“Goddamn it, this motherfucking thing is a bitch,” Tony snaps. 

“Tony!” Thor gasps. In the heat of battle, this man still is able to gasp. No fucking way, Tony thinks. He’s getting into the semantics of my fucking language right fucking now?

“To engage in… That with your own birth mother is a most abhorrent act!” 

“Not now, Thor,” Tony says from behind gritted teeth, firing his repulsor boots at maximum capacity to try and push the thing away. Then the back half of the train disappears, and Tony and Thor just manage to let go in time as the front half is sucked into a black hole that has already consumed the rest of the train.

“You’re welcome,” Phil says smugly from where he’s on the ground with a big-ass ray gun that he’s hoisting victoriously on one shoulder.

“Tony, that is most vulgar language -” Thor begins, but he never gets to finish, because suddenly the cars around them on the street start moving and fucking attacking them. Goddamnit, does it ever end? 

“This battle is hell,” Natasha gripes as she smoothly pivots and drop kicks a malevolent bicycle into the side of a nearby building. 

The whole battle lasts fourteen hours. Phil has lasted longer just doing paperwork, and Tony has worked for longer while trying to build his arc reactor to keep himself alive. But they’re all exhausted and weary by the time they defeat whichever evil sorcerer it is that decided to enchant bloody vehicles and fling them all at civilians and at the Avengers. They’re all drooping and leaning on each other, and when Pepper comes flying out from the lobby of the tower where she’s been encouraging them on through the comms, Natasha all but stumbles to her and drapes herself on Pepper for support. 

They’re about twenty metres away from SHIELD HQ when the Hulk collapses.

Bruce hadn’t changed back yet, and he had a huge green arm braced lightly on Steve’s shoulder and the other on Tony’s head. Then the pressure on both of them abruptly eases, and the Hulk shrinks until he’s just Bruce, nakedly flopping into Steve and Tony’s arms as they scramble to catch him. Steve notices it first, and claps a hand over his mouth. Then Tony sees, and his muttered “Oh God,” has the rest of the Avengers slowing to crowd around. 

There are numerous scars on Bruce’s body. Most of them are on his thighs, both legs fading patchworks of thin and thick white lines. Both thighs have lines crisscrossing everywhere, with some patches that have scars very neatly lined up in near parallel lines, and this was definitely not something the Avengers were expecting to see.

“Fuck,” Tony mutters. Steve looks at him, and growls “I’ll get whichever bastard did this to our Bruce.” Then Natasha is touching his arm with what looks like pity in her eyes, and Clint clings onto Phil’s arm with wide sad eyes, and Phil gently says “He did this to himself, Steve.” 

And it’s good that all of them are around and that Tony’s got good reflexes, because Steve let’s go of Bruce, and he’s just going “No, no, Bruce wouldn’t, why on earth would Bruce do something that horrific to himself? Bruce, tell me you didn’t, that must have been terribly painful, and it doesn’t even make sense…” He’s careening off, sprinting past them and ignoring their shouts, and he heads for Avengers Tower, pushes past a startled Fury, and then they can’t see him anymore.

“I don’t know anything about… About hurting yourself like this,” Natasha confesses, and Phil sighs and says that it’s alright, they’ll all search for information together and he and Pepper can probably compile everything relevant for all of them to read.

So Phil goes and tells Fury that debrief can wait, and they instead troop into their own tower instead of the impersonal SHIELD headquarters. They leave Bruce to Tony, and they all agree to convene in the living room in an hour.

An hour later, they’re all showered and clean from the dust and the grime, and they sit down in the living room. JARVIS has gotten Tony’s other robots to bring up Starktablets and Stark Industries’ laptops for them to use. They sit around in various corners, Natasha sitting next to Tony and Pepper cuddling into his other side. He misses Steve and Bruce, but Pepper’s light warmth is comforting all the same. He shakes his head as if to clear it of all the feelings that his heart is flooding him with, and gets down to business. They’ve got some research to do.

-+-

Soon after, Bruce walks in. Tony had bathed him, his own sporadic tears plopping into the bathwater while part of his heart lolled about in the water, getting scrubbed clean. Bruce’s dressed in his usual attire of track pants and a short sleeved tee, and then it dawns upon them that they’ve never seen Bruce wear exercise shorts. He even spars in track pants, and they’ve never realised that there could have been a reason beyond his simple “I like track pants.” Bruce stills, then comes to a halt as he realises that all the heads jerked up and the flow of conversation abruptly stops as they notice he’s there. Bruce knows he didn’t get clean on his own, and he doesn’t remember when he transformed back.

His heart sinks.

“Hey,” he tries. He intends to make it casual, but it somehow comes out all wrong. It sounds solemn and sad, and Tony slowly uncurls from where he’s drawn his knees up to his chest and puts his tablet down to pad, step by agonizingly quiet step, across the room to Bruce and enfolds him in a hug.

“What’s going on?” Bruce questions when Tony finally lets go of him. Tony pulls Bruce to sit down next to him and buries his head in his shoulder, just breathing in eau de Bruce. The rest of the Avengers rearrange themselves and the furniture to surround the coffee table in front of the sofa that Tony, Bruce, Pepper and Natasha are seated on. There’s an awkward silence that hangs heavily between them, until Steve shuffles into the room.

“I’m sorry,” he offers nervously. “I needed to be alone for a while, but Pepper and Phil emailed me the collated information, so I think I’m up to speed.” He holds up the tablet he’s been holding and apparently using in another room. Tony wordlessly flicks his eyes from Steve to the empty spot next to Bruce, and Steve goes over to snuggle up to Bruce.

“Okay, I think I know where this is heading,” Bruce finally says, a hint of resignation colouring his voice. “But I don’t… I don’t even know where to begin, so maybe I could just answer your questions?” 

Tony is the first to speak, moving his face from Bruce’s shoulder.

“Why did you do it?” He croaks, his own voice full of his unshed tears. There’s a sigh from Bruce, but he answers anyway.

“It helped,” he begins. “It began when I was thirteen. I realized that whenever I felt angry enough to change into the Hulk, I could grab a razor blade and the pain would take the edge off. When I change, everything starts blurring around the edges, and the world seems off-kilter and out of focus. The pain makes everything sharper and stopped me from transforming. Of course, later on when things changed, I did it because I hated myself. That was the period of time before I tried to swallow a bullet and he spat it right out.” Bruce never realised that telling people about what he felt was a shameful secret would be cathartic, but he’s feeling a little better. Some of the dread is slipping away. 

“So… You’re not doing it anymore?” This comes from Steve, who looks at him with his big liquid blue eyes, his hand gripping Bruce’s almost tightly enough to hurt.

“No,” Bruce says. This is easier than I thought, he thinks, and his world is coming back upright, slowly, again. “I stopped after I survived my suicide attempt. I burgled a grocery store and turned myself in so that I would get sent to jail. It was a secure facility and I needed somewhere that I knew I couldn’t kill myself again because of the constant scrutiny, and psychiatric wards were expensive but jails were free. I was released after a year, and then I worked as a bookstore assistant for a while before moving to India. And then that was where everything changed.”

“What else?” Clint prompts. 

“I was in a crippling depression in prison,” Bruce explains. “I lay in what was essentially a catatonic state – I shut myself off from everyone, and several times I landed up in the infirmary with an IV drip in the back of my hand and an NG tube down my throat. I was just lucky they didn’t try electroconvulsive therapy on me. But somehow I got over it, and I began exercising around the yard when they let us out twice a week. I was still in and out of it when I was released and up ‘til I moved to India, but India was different. I was actually useful because I liaised with the local government to set up a free clinic. It was a hell of a time trying to find an official who wasn’t corrupt, but eventually I did it. The locals had sons who learnt English at school, and they taught me the language. The village priest taught me to meditate and to pray. I wasn’t a religious man, but they respected me and I did likewise.”

“So you achieved some stability until I went and retrieved you,” Natasha broke in, sharp as ever and yet simultaneously blunt. Bruce smiles ruefully, because what could he do?

“Yes,” he admits, and feels Steve sag against him a little, and Tony curl his fingers into his even more tightly, the guilt emitting from them almost tangibly.

“None of you are at fault,” he says firmly. I can do this, he tells himself. I can tell people things I have never said before. 

“I didn’t want to leave, and in the first month I longed to be back, but you all gave me things I could never have found for myself. I’m over that period and those feelings. The Other Guy isn’t someone I hate anymore, and the meditation that I learnt helped me to cooperate with him. In fact, the locals over there never realised that I transformed into a huge angry green monster. He’s part of me, and yet a separate entity entirely, but I’m more or less at peace.”

“Well, at least we didn’t find out while we were about to fuck like bunnies. That would have been a total mood killer,” Tony quips. They laugh, and Steve swats playfully at Tony. Bruce doesn’t hit Tony, but he’s blushing adorably, and that laughter that all three of them produce and hear is what finally erases all their doubts, calms their hearts, and fills up the crevices in their souls.

-+-

“Somehow I think it’s kind of a stroke of serendipity that we haven’t had sex together yet,” Bruce tosses out as they lie awake shortly after stripping down and crawling into bed. They’ve been sleeping together in the same bed for two weeks, but the schedule thus far has made them so damn exhausted and prohibited them from fucking.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees as Bruce reaches around to pet their hair and run his fingers through it. “That would be a real buzz kill.”

“You don’t say,” Tony quietly murmurs, lost in his own brooding mood. 

“Penny for your thoughts,” Steve offers. Bruce feels Tony shift against him, squishing himself even closer.

“I don’t really know,” Tony says after a while, and his voice is quieter than they’ve ever heard it be. They’ve heard Tony shout into the comms, they’ve heard him in his PR voice when he’s fobbing off the press, and they’ve heard him in bed. But they’ve never heard him this broken.

“I came very close to that,” Tony admits. He feels Bruce stiffen, and he knows that Steve is doing the same. “It was the Christmas after Jarvis died. He was officially my butler, but he was the father I never had. When I fell off the bicycle I built myself, I went to him. When I wanted parental advice, parental consent forms signed, I went to him. I went to him for everything, and all the papers say is just ‘Jarvis, the elderly butler driving the car, also perished in the crash.’ They don’t say how much more important he was to me than my parents ever were.” 

“So I was lost, alone, and massively hung-over. I partied, threw the hugest party MIT had ever seen, groped more girls and guys than I’d ever done, nearly got raped, but at the end of it, all I had was a migraine and the broken shards of a bottle of Jack. I didn’t know what else was left, I was seventeen, and I had the biggest fucking shard poised right over my carotid. But I didn’t do it. I went back to my own workshop and emerged a week later with You instead.”

“But that was different,” he continues, and oh god why isn’t either of them shutting him up instead of letting him blather on and on like a fucking idiot? But he continues anyway, because once he’s started he can’t stop, and these two men said they loved him and would always love him, so he’s just going to give away even more of his heart, and caution can go fuck itself in the wind. 

“I nearly did it because I saw no way forward. I nearly did it because I lost someone whom I had given practically my whole heart too, and because he was the parent whom I’d bitterly wanted but never had.”

“You didn’t hate yourself,” Steve clarifies. Bruce feels Tony nod, the space between Tony’s chin and neck squeezing Bruce’s right shoulder.

“I could have lost you. We could have lost you,” Steve chokes out.

“Yeah,” Tony barely manages to eke out before both of them break down, the sound of their quiet sobs echoing in the vast, open floor. Their tears trickle down Bruce’s shoulders and chest as they each pillow their heads on different sides of him, and Bruce feels guiltier than he’s ever felt in his entire life.

“I’m sorry,” he says aloud, and then feels the warm weights shift and suddenly there are lips on his thighs, and oh my motherfucking god are they kissing his ugly scarred skin? He sits up quickly to check, and to his horror, they really are. He puts a hand on each of their heads, and pets them quickly.

“Guys, no, you really don’t want to do that -”

“Shut up,” Tony says, his voice higher and filled with tears. 

“We love all of you, Bruce, even the parts that make you regret and feel upset.”

“So stop looking at this as though it’s the sign of a monster. You’re a survivor, Bruce, and that’s all that you need to know.”

Steve reaches his huge hand up and pulls Bruce’s head down, and they all sit up and wrap their arms around each other. Steve and Tony gently push him to lie down. Steve puts his head on Bruce’s stomach, and Tony puts his on Bruce’s chest. The warm weight is comforting to Bruce, and the two of them are pretty sure that Bruce won’t bear to dislodge either of them. Bruce is going to stay right here until they’re both sure they’re not going to lose him anytime soon.

Tony snorts through the emotion.

“My heart feels too big for the arc reactor instead of the other way around,” Tony said. “And this is totally not gelling with any of our manly images with the public.”

“Last I checked, the bedroom was still private,” Steve quips, and Bruce happily rebuts with a teasing “Well, you should see all the pictures of Tony half naked in a hotel room…”

So they laugh. 

“Promise me you’ll never do that again,” Steve suddenly says, his voice and face solemn.

“Steve, the last time I did it was a few years ago,” Bruce reassures. “It’s alright. I’m over that period, and my days of collecting razor blades and breaking open plastic razors and hunting for glass shards on the ground are over. I don’t see that as a viable option I could ever take up. Not ever again.” He moves his hands to thread through Tony’s and Steve’s hair, as if telling them that yes, he is here, and he’s not going to disappear.

There’s no sex, but it’s definitely a blissful night.

/_\

 

“Damn,” Steve quietly curses as he puts down what he’s holding in his hands to rub at his temples. He’s in the living room, seated in the easy chair. Bruce gets up from where he’s been reading a scientific journal to go over, and picks up the shirt Steve’s been trying to mend.

“I can’t seem to get it right,” Steve sighs. “I can knit and embroider, but I can’t seem to mend a simple shirt.” 

“It’s okay,” Bruce says distractedly as he quickly weaves the needle in and out of the soft fabric. Steve is mesmerised by the sight of Bruce’s hands quickly sewing up the small hole, and he blinks out of it only when he realises that Bruce is handing back the shirt with a smile.

“I didn’t know you could sew that well,” he says in wonderment. Bruce shrugs and chuckles. “Living in India, well, you pick up some things.” 

Just then, Tony breezes in.

“Bruce, dear, I took the liberty of ordering you some suits,” he says gleefully. He waves off Bruce’s half-hearted protests and pets him on the head.

“It was such a pain trying to get your measurements,” he grouses. “I looked through your clothes, but they all had no tags or any size measurements! I had to remember how you fit in my arms and what you feel like under me to tell my tailor what size to make!”

Bruce starts, then stares, then finally breaks out into a fully belly laugh. He laughs and laughs, and he finally stops, wheezing and gasping, to find both of them looking at him in befuddlement.

“What’s so funny?” Steve asks. 

“Remember I said that I picked up some skills in India? Well, the secret of my lack of tags lies there…”

“You mean you sewed your own clothes?!” Tony shrieks, his own arms flailing in disbelief, because he’s the guy who throws out his old shirts instead of mending them, who can build robots from scratch, but can’t sew to save his life.

“Yep. I did. It was expensive to purchase clothes all the time because I Hulked out more often after I stopped the self-injury and let my own mind push through the depression, so I bought bolts of fabric instead and a cheap sewing machine, and embarked on making all my own clothes.”

“That explains the sewing machine on the list of things you brought in,” Tony says thoughtfully. The thing is old, rusted, and foot-operated, but Bruce loves the thing to bits. It’s oddly symbolic of his own recovery and it’s his new found coping method – sewing calms him down, because there’s the rhythmic clicking and whirring and the rows of neat stitches appearing while his foot pumps the pedal steadily. 

A week later, Bruce pulls the machine out to discover that it’s been oiled and repaired, and given a fresh new coat of paint.

“You like it? Steve painted it and I figured out how to fix it,” Tony burbles excitedly. 

“Definitely,” Bruce beams.

The rest of them will find out soon, because Bruce plans to make all their Christmas presents.

Anyway, for now, he’s going to make a shirt for Tony and a pair of pants for Steve. He grabs his wallet, and heads out to do a spot of fabric shopping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter - Natasha!


	6. Of PTSD and Ballet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the delay - I was planning to update daily, but real life got in the way. On Friday I had no lesson periods to use for writing, and I attended a performance of TAL with my team mates and got home nearly at midnight. And today, Saturday, was largely sucked up by project work (that dratted subject) and by a family gathering.
> 
> So I did take ballet for four to five years, but I stopped when I was 11, so I don't think I remember very much of it. I had to keep Googling for a lot of the terms, so do forgive me if you think the ballet bit is sketchy.
> 
> Anyway, onwards! This is a 4k monster that I didn't entirely plan. It just spiraled out into four thousand words.

“I don’t believe it,” Natasha grumbled, rolling her eyes. She was seated at the Starbucks down the street from Avengers Tower, nursing a black coffee. Pepper giggled, her musical laughter making Natasha’s heart melt just ever so slightly.

“Well, it certainly was very sweet of the rest of them to set us up on a date,” she says coyly. She slips her foot free of her high heel and teasingly runs it over Natasha’s, wiggling her toes against her shin. Natasha laughs, because she loves Pepper, and a cute flirty Pepper never fails to make her laugh.

And that’s where it all goes, goddamn it, to hell.

Masked men burst through the door, nearly blowing it off with the force of their entry. But they’re all still human, so it doesn’t quite come off. It just swings back with a deafening screech, to slam shut. 

“All of you, stand up! Put your hands on your heads!” The first one yells, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s the leader. He’s thick and swarthy, and has a deep throaty voice. He keeps his handgun pointed at the girl behind the cashier, while the rest of his cronies fan out behind him to sweep their AK-47s from side to side, menacingly and malevolently staring down everyone else.

But she’s Natasha, and fuck no, she’s not going to let this bunch of shitheads ruin a perfectly good date and just walk in and threaten the lives of every innocent damn civilian in here. So she whips out her own weapon, shouts “GET THE FUCK DOWN!” and sprays bullets into the chests of every gunman but the leader before they can react. She’s itching to put a bullet through his skull, but she doesn’t because she recognized that voice and that body – it’s some high profile robber that the Feds are trying to get, so in the interest of jurisdiction she wants him alive for them to prosecute. Not that she cares, but she knows how annoying it is for someone to kill the guy you’ve been going after for months, or even years.

The menacing boys behind the leader aren’t all dead, but they’re not very intelligent either. In fact, they’re screaming and crying and rolling around, adding to the general chaos. People are stampeding for the doors, only to find that they’re locked. And Natasha turns around to look for Pepper, and holy fuck where the motherfucking hell is she? And it turns out that the leader is way too goddamn smart. Because he’s identified Natasha as the gunwoman and has already dragged Pepper over to him, holding her in front of himself as a human shield and has his own pistol pointed right at his temple.

Natasha’s heart stops beating.

“Put down your gun or I’ll shoot,” he threatens. Her aim wavers, because goddamn it Pepper is the only lover she’s had in her life who really knew who she was and wanted to stay, and loved who she was despite all the red in her ledger.

“Don’t, darling,” Pepper calls out, her trembling voice betraying the fear that Natasha knows she’s trying very hard to suppress right now.

“Oh, so you two are together,” the bulky gunman leers. He keeps his pistol there, tapping it against Pepper’s temple. “If you don’t put down your gun now and kick it over, I’ll blow out your pretty girlfriend’s brains. But before that, I’ll fuck her first.”

Natasha puts down the gun, carefully, onto the floor and slides it over. It’s both the hardest and the easiest decision she’s made in her life.

“Smart choice,” he taunts. “But I’m going to fuck her anyway. She’s got a fine face, and a good set of tits and ass too. You know what they say about lezbos? They just need a good fucking with a real dick. I hope you’ve done enough anal fucking, because I don’t carry lube with me and I’m definitely an ass man.” He moves the gun a few millimetres away from Pepper’s head, but it’s still so close that Pepper can nearly hear the metal sing. Well, she would if she were Erik Lehnsherr, but that’s not the point. 

“Too bad for you here, slut,” he drawls, putting his hands on Pepper’s ass. “You won’t be saved from my cock. Your super gunwoman girlfriend can’t do anything if she wants you alive.”

He reaches down to unbuckle his pants, and slowly releases his erect cock. Natasha’s seen a lot of cocks, and his is definitely on the ugly side. There are nice looking ones, but his is just plain fucking ugly. He slowly ruts against Pepper’s ass, bending her over and grabbing at the line of the pants she’s wearing, and Natasha’s world goes red because you don’t do that to my girlfriend, you sisterfucking asshat bitch. 

Natasha springs over, but that’s when Pepper reacts anyway.

Pepper is bent down just enough for her to reach the gun. She grabs it, spins up and back and brings her right knee into his face, then leaps up and snaps her left instep right into his fucking exposed hairy disgusting balls. He’s on the ground, his own gun forgotten, groaning and moaning with his hands at his groin, so Pepper stomps on his hands then pistol-whips him with the butt of Natasha’s gun.

“Take that, you disgusting creep,” she hisses. “Good thing you taught me how to defend myself,” she says as she turns to Natasha, only to find her grinding her heel into the guy’s face. His nose is a bloody mess. Now he’s alternately moaning and screaming for mercy, and Pepper grabs Natasha’s arm to pull her off to pull her into her own arms.

“I’m fine,” Pepper reassures Natasha, repeating it again, kissing Natasha’s forehead as she sees the glazed look in her girlfriend’s eyes and feels the minute tremors in her muscles. She herself still has adrenaline running through her system, and she was afraid back there, but she knows that she’s safe now, and so are the rest of the people in this Starbucks outlet.

“I’m fine, you’re fine, and I’m right here and I’m not going anywhere,” Pepper repeats again and again in Natasha’s ear as she hears the wail of sirens coming way too late to save anyone, and as the people slowly start applauding and crowding around them to thank them for a job well done.

-+-

In the middle of the night, Pepper wakes up panting. She sits up and gasps for air as she forces the memory of the man grinding against her out of her mind. That’s over and done with, she fiercely tells herself. Then she hears a whimper and a sob, and Natasha’s flailing arms tangle up the bed sheets and smack her in the side. She reaches over to touch Natasha, and she wakens instantly. Natasha’s teary eyes meet hers. She flings her arms around Pepper and clings, crawling into Pepper’s lap to wrap herself around her girlfriend like a baby koala clinging to its mama. 

Natasha’s back heaves as she cries, great gulping sobs bursting forth, for the first time in a very long while.

Pepper holds her, quietly murmuring in her ear, until Natasha relaxes enough for her to lie down and hold her in her arms and pull the blanket over them once more.

-+-

Pepper’s nightmares stop after a few days, as she continues about her routine of running Stark Industries. Natasha goes about her routines too, of training herself and training other people.

But her nightmares don’t stop after a week.

In fact, it’s like a floodgate’s been opened. Natasha doesn’t get nightmares often, unless some missions trigger something particularly traumatic for her. And then it’s fleeting and gone behind the mask that she uses to lock down her brain and anything she doesn’t want to feel. But now she’s getting them at least once a night, and she tries her best not to wake Pepper up but she wakes up anyway. In fact, it’s so bad that she wakes up multiple times in the night, and doesn’t even feel marginally rested in the morning. It’s now a routine for Pepper to sleepily comfort Natasha and hug her back to sleep.

But two weeks later, both of them are ridiculously tired. Natasha looks like a droopy limp flower, and Pepper is nodding off over her toast at breakfast. That’s when Natasha decides to start sleeping on the couch in Pepper’s office, and Pepper still hasn’t woken up properly, so through the fog in her brain she mumbles a yes and then nearly goes face first into her plate. Thankfully, Natasha saves her in time.

Anyway, that night, Pepper comes barrelling into her own office, in her shorts and tank top and her hair loose, barefooted.

“What are you doing here? Get back in bed,” she clucks at Natasha, bundled up in blankets and huddled on the couch. She waves off Natasha’s protests about not wanting her to lose any more sleep on her behalf, and takes her wrist and leads her back to bed.

But nightmares aren’t all that there is. 

One day, when Pepper has stepped out to the bathroom, Natasha pops her head into her office because it’s lunchtime. She freezes when she sees the empty office, and does what her brain tells her to.

“Pepper Potts, report your location,” she commands over the public announcement system in Avengers Tower. The people in the lower office floors all look around in bewilderment, because this is new. The PA system is almost never used, and isn’t that Black Widow’s voice? What is she doing?

Natasha picks up the sound of someone’s high heels against the floor outside. The familiar click clack rhythm puts her at ease, and Pepper comes striding into the room in a hurry. 

“What’s the matter, Nat darling?” She asks as she comes over and kisses Natasha.

“Nothing,” Natasha smoothly replies, but Pepper is a sharp woman, and she caught the relieved exhale of breath. She puts it aside and doesn’t mention it, because she knows asking about it would make Natasha uncomfortable. It’s not that Natasha doesn’t trust Pepper – it’s just that she’s still adjusting to the idea of being able to tell someone else what you worry about and fear.

“Let’s go for lunch,” Natasha says, and she leads Pepper down the block, detouring to avoid the Starbucks, and enters a small little café that would only have taken them five minutes to reach but instead takes them fifteen now.

-+-

Pepper can’t put it aside after five weeks. 

Because Natasha hasn’t had Starbucks in five weeks, not from the outlet down the street, not from the one two streets over, and not from the one they see when they go to LA to tackle an outbreak of flesh eating turtles. 

Because Natasha has called for her six times over the PA system. 

Because Natasha has taken to sleeping with a thumb in her mouth so she has something to bite down on instead of screaming or whimpering in her sleep. 

Because Natasha is now jumpy and too quick to react, and it’s definitely a departure from her usual unruffled, calm self that Pepper hasn’t seen in weeks.

Because Natasha has bags beneath her eyes that Pepper sees before Natasha skilfully applies concealer. And because Pepper loves Natasha, and she knows something’s not right, and it’s not going away on its own.

Pepper lets her and Natasha sleep in after a particularly harrowing night. Natasha had awoken and bolted to puke, silent tears mingling with the sweat while Pepper blearily rubbed her stomach and her back. It was a long while before either of them got back to sleep. Ironically, it was both because they were worried about each other.

Pepper had asked Phil and Clint to help her discreetly, and they compiled enough information for Pepper to confirm her own initial fears – Natasha fit all the signs of PTSD. It was strange to think that someone like Natasha would have PTSD, but Pepper didn’t care. Her girlfriend was not entirely well, and she intended to get to the bottom of things.

So after they both get six hours of desperately needed rest, they awake. Pepper has informed Tony of her plans, and he told her to take a few days off, as many as she needed. They shuffle around each other in the bathroom, and Pepper then leads Natasha out into the living room where it’s brighter. She’s hoping the bright sunlight will improve the mood.

“Nat, love, I think you have a problem,” she begins after Natasha and her have finished their breakfast. She leaves the plates where they are and takes Natasha to sit on the plush sofa instead.

“I don’t, Pep,” Natasha denies. Gently, Pepper reaches out to take her girlfriend’s face in her hands and leans close enough for their foreheads to touch. 

“You do,” she says softly, her breath ghosting across Natasha’s face. “You have recurring, persistent nightmares, and for the first time last night, you threw up. They’re getting worse, and you’re not sleeping properly and you look so tired all the time. You get anxious whenever I’m not where you expect me to be, even though I just stepped out to go and pee. You’re avoiding all Starbucks outlets. Clint tells me that you haven’t used that gun ever since while practicing in the shooting range. And this all started happening five weeks ago when the incident happened.”

Natasha looks over at the TV, at the window, at the remains of breakfast. Anywhere but Pepper’s eyes, because if she looks she thinks she will break. 

“You and I both know it,” Pepper continues, even though her heart feels like it’s splintering because her girlfriend looks so guilty that she can’t even look her in the eye.

“You and I both know that something’s not right. And you know that you fit all the symptoms of PTSD. I went and looked up everything, love. And I love you too much to just let you ignore it and remain in denial because you’re going to collapse from exhaustion at this rate.” Finally, Natasha looks back at her again, and she’s got wet eyes and an expression that’s mixed with relief and annoyance.

“I just felt so helpless back there,” Natasha says, and then moves to straddle Pepper’s lap and press herself against her. 

“I couldn’t protect you. What if that happens again?”

“Then we’ll work on training me to react better and maybe to carry a small gun in my purse,” Pepper soothes. They sit, until their coffee grows cold, and until the sun changes from the morning light to the harsher light of noon. 

“Nat, love, I want you to see a psychiatrist,” Pepper says as they wash the dishes together, Pepper elbow deep in sudsy water and Natasha drying the plates with a dishtowel.

“I’m not taking meds,” Natasha says quickly. The thought of ingesting any medicine meant to alter any of her functions, neurological or not, is just plain terrifying to her.

“I know,” Pepper says. “The psychiatrist I’m suggesting is rather unorthodox. Xe doesn’t like to prescribe meds, but prefers to be a bit more like a psychologist. Xe can prescribe just in case there’s a patient who really needs it, but most of the medication isn’t prescribed.”

“Xe?” Natasha asks, her brows furrowed.

“The psychiatrist I’m thinking of is genderqueer,” Pepper says, and wow, who would have thought that? “Hope you don’t have a problem with that.”

“No, of course not,” Natasha hurriedly says, because of course she wouldn’t have a problem with that. Not after having to suppress whatever she felt for girls after she hit puberty while still under the Red Room, because if someone had ratted on her, she would have been fucked. Literally, because she heard how these two fifteen year old boys had been caught making out, and the two of them had become pleasure slaves for the upper echelons of the Red Room before they both committed suicide. 

After knowing that she could be persecuted for whoever she liked, even though she didn’t make a conscious choice to like someone of any gender, she could finally disregard all the homophobic propaganda that they had implanted into her.

There’s a pause before Pepper speaks again.

“Xe’s really very good,” she says. Then, hesitantly, “I know because Tony and I and most of the other Avengers have been to see xer.”

“Oh,” Natasha says. Actually, it’s not too much of a surprise. Practically all of them are fucked up inside, and they all carry their own demons with them. 

“I want you to get better, Nat darling. I want you to get over this. It’s painful for me to see you like this, and I don’t want you to suffer like this anymore. It’s not shameful to see a psychiatrist, or to admit that you have something that you can’t cope with alone. You’ve got me, and you’ve got all the rest of the Avengers. I’ll be here for you always, love, but you need to admit that you need the help.”

Natasha has clenched both fists, the dishtowel crinkled in one hand. She’s staring resolutely outside, through the kitchen window at the teeming bustle outside in the city that is Manhattan. It’s a long time that she spends without replying or even looking at Pepper, but there are way too many thoughts running through her head. I have a problem. I don’t have a problem. Pepper wants me to go to a psychiatrist. I don’t want to go. I have to go. I’m so tired, and I want to sleep without waking up with a barely muffled scream. I don’t want anyone to mess with my head. I don’t want this. But I need this. And Pepper loves me, I love her, and she wants the best for me.

“Alright,” Natasha ultimately agrees. “Will you go with me?” Her voice quivers just that tiny bit, and Pepper knows how much this is taking out of Natasha. Pepper turns and leans in for a kiss. Pulling away, she says “Of course I will.”

For the first time in a very long while, Natasha feels something in her chest lift and fly away.

 

/_\

 

“O, mighty Avengers!!” Thor’s booming yell resounds throughout the living room where the rest of the Avengers are. They’re all there waiting for Thor to show up, because it’s movie night and they’ve picked out a French film, Tomboy. Phil and Pepper are standing guard over the popcorn tubs, and are trying to keep Tony’s and Clint’s roving hands away from stealing the supply. 

“What is it, Thor?” Pepper says, smiling. She finds it amusing how Thor still hasn’t learnt how loud his voice really is, despite having already lived for countless human lifetimes. Then she flicks Tony in the forehead as he tries to take advantage of her temporary distraction to steal popcorn, and he reels back, holding his forehead and moaning dramatically.

“Director Fury has informed me that we, SHIELD, are to put on a Christmas performance!” He says excitedly. “I am certainly anticipating this!”

“We need both agents and superheroes to perform,” Phil speaks up from where he’s currently squishing Clint’s hands in his own and weaving his own legs around Clint’s to keep him from getting to the popcorn. 

“So who gets to perform?” Natasha asks.

“Anyone,” Phil replies. “But they have to submit a proposal and let me vet their performance before they get the go ahead to keep practicing and to show up for rehearsals.”

“Why are we putting on a performance?” Clint asks, suspiciously. He worms one hand free and taps Phil’s nose playfully, only to be held in a finger lock. Phil chuckles as he releases Clint and propels him back to the sofa, looking all pouty. 

“Director Fury mentioned that it was for a most charitable cause! To raise money for orphans and war veterans!” Thor says from his spot on the couch, where he’s been talking and gesturing animatedly with Steve.

“Ah, a charity performance,” Tony says and rubs his hands gleefully. “We could have a segment where we auction off things. It’s easy to auction things when you’re a superhero.” He nudges Steve meaningfully, and Steve hurriedly blurts “No! I’m not auctioning kisses!” 

Bruce laughs and nearly rolls off the couch, because he knows Tony’s stolen some of Steve’s underwear – his signature tighty whiteys – and has them kept in a box labelled “Superhero Things to Auction”.

“I can auction off a front disk for my arc reactor, and also a spare face plate off my helmet. Or I could babysit,” Tony offers.

“I can sketch,” Steve says. The others all clamour around – Clint says he can spare a handmade wooden arrow, Thor adds his offer of a small Mjolnir model of Asgardian construct, Bruce proffers to tailor an outfit, and Pepper proposes to design a pair of shoes. 

“An auction is not a bad idea,” Phil says thoughtfully. “I can offer up a dinner – six to twenty courses, depending on the bidder. I’ll approach Director Fury about setting up an auction.” 

“I’ll perform,” Natasha says to Phil. They agree on a date for an audition – one week from now, at three in the afternoon in Phil’s office. 

“What are you going to do?” Bruce asks Natasha curiously. She gives a mysterious wink and a small smile, and commandeers the remote, swiping it from Tony. She presses play, and all talk of the auction or the charity concert is forgotten as they settle in to watch the movie.

-+- 

The Avengers are seated in a row, barring Clint and Natasha as both are performing. There’s a muted hush as the curtains are drawn, and the announcer’s voice comes on once again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for our last final performance of the evening… May I present to you, Natasha Romanov and Clint Barton of the Avengers!”

The curtains go back, and none of them are expecting what they see on stage.

Natasha is standing on stage in a black tutu, poised elegantly, with a perfect smile on her face. Her hair has been gelled back and bunned up somehow even though her normal length is not long enough for a bun. Clint is standing off to the side, in what can only be described as a suit of black Lycra with a few elaborate ruffles on it, holding the Stradivarius proudly. 

He lifts the violin to his shoulder, and the magic begins.

Natasha’s skill and passion is evident in every graceful movement she makes, not just the pirouettes, but every step, every hand action, seems to radiate poise and an inherent sophistication and refinement from within her. Clint is the only musician around, and although the music was originally provided by a full orchestra, he somehow manages to produce the same effect. He coaxes the long notes out of the aging violin, and plucks the strings skilfully at parts. 

Finally, the music ends in a crescendo, and Natasha finishes back in her graceful original pose. She takes a deep curtsy as Clint dramatically sweeps one leg behind him and bows. Then, Clint walks off stage to deposit his violin, and Natasha exits the stage at stage right to the sound of tremendous applause and catcalls.

Suddenly, there is upbeat orchestral music, and that shuts the audience up. Clint enters again, and does some impressive jetes and fouettes and wow. Because no one knew Clint could dance. But Natasha is standing right behind him, and she steals the show by doing thirty fouettes until she receives a standing ovation. 

Then Clint does some of his own, going off to the side of the stage, and Natasha follows right behind, then glides backward teasingly. He trails after her like a puppy, goes behind her to perform an impressive lift, then finally kneels to kiss her proffered hand.

It’s to wolf whistles, catcalls and thunderous applause that Natasha and Clint curtsy and bow to, and they leave as the curtain falls once more.

-+-

Pepper sweeps Natasha into a hug, and Phil reaches proudly for Clint’s hand as the two performers exit the dressing room. 

“That was brilliant!” Pepper gushes. “I never knew you could dance!” Natasha is happier than Pepper has ever seen her be, and Pepper squeezes her again because she’s just so happy to see her girlfriend this glad.

“It’s the only thing that the Red Room provided me with that I haven’t despised at some point in time,” Natasha says. “They used to teach dance to whichever of their trainees who wanted it, and after I joined them as a child, I looked forward to the ballet lessons more than I anticipated the meals.”

“I’ll make sure you have more opportunities to dance,” promises Pepper, and she will get this thing done if it kills her, if only to see that spark in Natasha’s eyes again. Natasha leans in and captures Pepper’s lips, because she now can do what she likes (almost) the best, her girlfriend loves her, and practically everything is alright in this moment.

“I didn’t know you could dance,” Phil says to Clint.

“I couldn’t,” Clint replies, smirking. “Nat taught me that in three weeks. Guess being a circus performer helped quite a lot.” 

“That was very good, and very, very hot,” Phil breathes in Clint’s ear, then he grabs Clint’s head and kisses him hard.

“Tonight was definitely a success,” declares Bruce, and Natasha and Clint promptly inform the rest that Bruce had been in charge of making their costumes. There are hearty backslaps all around from one another, and Thor gives his ebullient praises to everyone, proclaiming the Avengers to be the mightiest charitable fundraisers for all in the building to hear.

Tonight, Pepper privately thinks, is probably the best night in her relationship with Natasha so far.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ballet performance that I watched and tried to describe can be found here:  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xNqbvNx_C8&feature=related
> 
> In the next chapter... Guess who? Shouldn't be too hard - it's Pepper next. And after her is Thor and Loki, for which I have difficult plans *gulp*


	7. Of Eating Disorders (again) and of Being 1337

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Checked the views at the end of the day and wow, 3034! Thank you all!
> 
> If this chapter sucks, please flame, but please also know that today was a pretty bad day. Found out that I'm sensitive to noise in classrooms and nearly freaked out in Chinese class today because the combined class was just chaotic. Ended up digging out my razor blade during break just to prevent myself from running off and hiding somewhere for the rest of the day.
> 
> Anyway, onwards. I know it's cliched for a girl to have an eating disorder and to do it because of a man, but my brain and a girl in what she thinks is love are both similarly stupid.

One day, the filing cabinet in Phil’s office collapsed.

It was catastrophic. 

The filing cabinet was not just any filing cabinet. It was a monster filing cabinet. The thing itself took up one whole wall of Phil’s office, and his office was the average width but really fucking long. There were drawers from A-Z, and practically every single one of them was filled to bursting with thick plastic dossiers with papers hole-punched and filed inside. The whole thing probably weighed more than the Avengers put together.

And it collapsed on Phil.

No one knows how it happened, but after Tony swept it for mechanical and electronic devices and declared it clean, Clint and Natasha scoured it for traces of tampering and came up with nothing. They wouldn’t stop, and the two of them theorized for a week, but finally they just concluded that it must have just collapsed of its own will. 

Anyway, the Avengers were all in the office when it happened. Phil wanted to meet them to brief them about the next mission, which involved the nabbing of an intergalactic thief who had been stealing priceless relics of history and art. Phil had walked over to retrieve the file from the cabinet, and then the whole thing just collapsed on him.

“Oof,” Phil grunted as he lay pinned under the thing, the edge of a drawer digging painfully into his hip. Paper fluttered all around as the top drawers (which contained his office supplies) sprang out and pens clattered to the ground. The rest of the files had also similarly fallen out and, thankfully, cushioned some of the force of the blow. 

“One, two, three!” shouted Steve, and it took all of them a massive effort to get the thing lifted up. Phil was lucky enough that he hadn’t sustained any fractures, just some heavy bruising. He accepted Clint’s offered hand, and dusted off his suit.

“That was a mighty cabinet,” proclaimed Thor.

“Well, it does – it had some very important documents in it,” sighed Phil, looking at the mess of files scattered around his office.

“We’ll help you tidy up,” offered Pepper. 

“Thanks,” Phil says gratefully over Clint’s shoulder, because Clint is making him hold his arms up so that he can check if Phil has any broken bones.

They’re an hour into sorting the files when Thor holds up a huge ass plastic box file marked “The Avengers”.

“This file is about us?” He asks Phil, who answers in the affirmative and continues sorting out the puddles of files around his feet.

“May I peruse it?” Thor enquires politely. “I believe this might make for interesting reading.”

Now that takes a bit of thought. Then, Phil thinks, why the hell not? They already should know what’s in the files – after all, they did whatever was inside.

“Alright,” Phil acquiesces. “But after you all finish help me sorting out everything!” He adds, as he sees Tony make grabby hands for the thick box file. Tony pouts, but Bruce and Steve both lean over to give him a kiss on each cheek, and he produces a mega-watt smile, looking like he’s on the moon.

“Thanks for helping me out,” Phil says as he hands out a file to each member. 

“No problem,” Natasha says as she receives her file – which is ridiculously thick like Bruce’s. It’s the thickness of a dictionary, and Pepper groans as she looks at the thing.

“I’m going to have fun reading about all your daring exploits,” she says teasingly, hefting her girlfriend’s dossier in her hand, playfully using it as a dumb bell. Natasha laughs and takes her file back. 

“I’ll read through yours too,” she promises.

“I’ll need those back in two days!” Phil calls out as the Avengers leave the room. Not that they’ll adhere to the deadline, but he’s Phil Coulson. He’ll find a way to get those files back.

-+-

“I have a lot of things that you might not want to know in their entirety,” Natasha warns Pepper as she sinks down on the sofa next to Pepper, curling into her side with Pepper’s file in her hands.

“Well, how about this? Phil filed the summaries and the quick report in the front half, and he cross-referenced it to all the details in the back. Perhaps anytime I want to read the details, I’ll just ask you, and you’ll do the same?” 

“That’s a good idea,” Natasha agrees, leaning over and kissing Pepper. “Then I can keep you away from exactly how I killed all those men. You can read through the numbers and then decide whether you want the gory details or not.” Pepper giggles and touches her nose to Natasha’s, and Natasha decides that that is the best sound she’s ever heard in her entire life. It even wins over the sound of the helicopter that came to pick her and Clint up from Budapest and bring them into a new chapter of their lives.

Later, Natasha frowns. 

“Pepper, there’s a hospital stay for nearly a month recorded here,” she begins, and Pepper’s heart sinks. Damn. She had hoped, futilely, that Natasha wouldn’t want to see the details of that.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t want to see the details of that,” Pepper says stiffly. Natasha reaches out for her hand and squeezes it. 

“I’m not ready to share that with you, Nat. Not yet. Please. Promise me you won’t read it.”

“Of course,” Natasha quickly promises and rubs her thumb against the back of Pepper’s hand, reassuring her. Pepper squeezes her hand back and looks oddly grateful. Natasha desperately wants to ask and to cross-reference the initial report to the thicker portion at the back because she loves Pepper and wants to know why on earth she was sick or ill enough to even warrant a lengthy hospital admission. But she doesn’t read the file. 

She trusts Pepper to tell her when she’s ready.

-+-

Two weeks later, Pepper catches the stomach flu.

The revealing of the truth all begins when Natasha goes into their darkened bedroom to find Pepper sitting upright, leaning against the headboard of the bed. She was hunched over, a slim hand on her stomach, and beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead.

“What’s wrong?” Natasha asks urgently, sliding behind Pepper to wipe her forehead and rub her abdomen. 

“I don’t feel well,” Pepper grits out.

“Do you need to vomit?”

“No,” she blurts out quickly. “No, I don’t need to.”

“You might feel better,” Natasha says, a little taken aback by the force and speed of Pepper’s answer. 

“It’s okay,” Pepper answers, forcing herself to stay calm. You can’t let Natasha suspect anything, she reminds herself. “It would be nice if I could have a heating pad, though.” Natasha slips out of bed to fetch it, and she tells herself that there is nothing suspicious about Pepper, and that Pepper would never lie to her.

Or would she?

-+-

It’s a day later that Natasha realises that Pepper is remarkable at vomit control. 

Pepper has been turning nearly as white as the sky outside her office window intermittently for the past hour, and clamping a hand over her mouth. A few moments later, her hand on her stomach stills, and she picks up her pen again and gets back to her work. From her point on the couch, Natasha narrows her eyes at her girlfriend.

“Pep, you need to get it out of your system,” she says gently, going to stand behind Pepper and massaging her tense shoulders. Pepper sighs in relief as Natasha begins working out the knots in her shoulder muscles, but shakes her head.

“I won’t,” she says, as firmly as she can manage.

“You’ve been nauseous since last night,” Natasha protests. Her heart hurts whenever she sees Pepper turn pale. Why, oh why, is her stupid girlfriend so stubborn? 

“I don’t like seeing you in pain,” Natasha says in Pepper’s ear as she reaches her own muscled hand down to Pepper’s stomach, feeling it flip and tumble and roil – and damn, only her quick reflexes save Pepper from upchucking on the floor. She puts the wastepaper basket on the floor, and holds back Pepper’s hair while Pepper shudders and finally heaves up whatever’s hurting her from inside.

When Pepper finally sits up, breathing hard, Natasha snags a tissue and carefully wipes her face and mouth, and guides her to take slow sips of water. She sees the tears in Pepper’s eyes, and she gently thumbs them away. But what she doesn’t expect is a fresh outflow of tears, and harsh sobs that wrack Pepper’s body and make her shake, stand up on wobbly legs and collapse into Natasha’s arms.

“Hush, I’ve got you,” Natasha tries to soothe awkwardly. I’ve never been good at this comforting thing, she thinks, but she thinks again about how Pepper held her through nightmare-terror-filled nights, and she gently rubs her back and lets Pepper put her tear-sodden face into her shoulder and drip snot all over.

When Pepper pulls away, she looks with watery eyes at the clock. 

“I need to eat,” she declares shakily, and Natasha furrows her brow and looks at her, because god, girl, you just threw up your own guts after almost two days of resisting it, and now you want to eat?

Pepper shuts her eyes against the look that Natasha is giving her. She knows it’s stupid, and she knows it’s going to make her stomach hurt, but she knows she won’t puke if she eats slowly and doesn’t overdo it.

“Just get me something. I’ll explain it to you later,” Pepper says, and Natasha reads please, I just really, really need this in her eyes, so she manoeuvres Pepper over to sit on the couch and leaves to find some toast.

Natasha pulls Pepper into her side, under her arm, and props the plate of dry toast on her knee. Pepper takes a slice, and nibbles slowly at it, resting her head on Natasha’s shoulder. 

“Is this about the hospital visit that got you there for a month?” Natasha finally asks when Pepper finishes the slice, and really, Pepper isn’t surprised anymore.

“Yes,” Pepper answers. 

“Did you have an eating disorder?” Natasha’s voice is soft, ever so soft, but the question is loaded and it still sends chills down Pepper’s spine. She knows that Natasha knows the answer already, and it shouldn’t be hard to tell her girlfriend that she once felt bad enough about herself to starve and binge and puke up whatever she had eaten for the day. But still, it’s a huge admission, and it takes a while for her to work up the courage.

“Yes,” she answers, and that was hard. But Natasha’s fierce answering hug is all she needs, and the words spill, unbidden, from her.

“It started when I broke up with Tony. I felt that I had failed – I was supposed to be the love of his life, and I know that it’s stupid to try to make myself live up to whatever the media describes us as, but I did it anyway. Tony said that it wasn’t my fault, and that it was his fault that we didn’t work out, but I couldn’t let it go. After that he went out and fucked around, and every time I saw the tabloids print a picture of him drunk off his ass with a skinny little thing hanging off his arm and his broken eyes that no one saw, I felt even worse. I thought that the reason as to why we didn’t work out was because I wasn’t skinny enough, and I really, really wanted the Tony that I knew back. I was stupid, and foolish, but I did it anyway.”

“Come here, Pep,” Natasha sighs, her voice breaking a little, kind of like the state of her heart. She puts the plate of toast down on the table and lies down, pulling Pepper to lie on her chest, guiding her head to fit in the crook between her collarbone and her chin. Pepper snuggles in, and Natasha puts her hand atop Pepper’s silky hair.

“That stupid man. I’m so going to kill him,” Natasha grumbles, but without any malice. She smoothes her hand along Pepper’s long hair, and drops her head to take a deep sniff of the familiar smell.

“Anyway, you shouldn’t kill Tony. He was the one who realised and got me help. I didn’t talk to him or see him for six months, and by then, I’d lost so much weight that I looked like a skeleton. He cried when he saw me, Nat. He cried, and then he made me look in the mirror and then tried to feed me. He cried some more when he realised that I couldn’t keep solid food down anymore, and he looked like a kicked puppy when I told him that I did it because I thought I wasn’t skinny enough for him. It was the first time I’d seen him cry since Afghanistan.” 

Pepper stops talking, and just closes her eyes. She shuts her eyes, and reaches for Natasha’s hand, and then she hears Natasha speak.

“And getting the stomach flu… Throwing up must have been a trigger for you, wasn’t it?” Pepper nods, and she feels like crying again because she feels so lucky to have met Natasha, who picks up on things and understands and doesn’t ask more of her than she can give. 

“You listen to me, Pepper Potts,” Natasha’s voice comes strong and full of unshed tears, right in her ear. “Don’t ever do that to yourself again. I don’t just mean developing unhealthy eating habits to lose weight, but I mean trying to eat when you’re not up to eating, because it’s just going to make everything hurt more. I’m here, I’m here for you and I always will be, and I’ll make sure you don’t relapse back into it, whether or not it’s a choice. I’m going to have all three meals with you from now on, just like Clint does with Phil, and you don’t need to worry. I’ll be here to catch you if you fall.”

Pepper turns to lie on her front, and she kisses Natasha, long and hard. There are no words, but that kiss and the next hour spent lying in each other’s arms on Pepper’s office couch are more than enough to speak for them. It says I love you, and I will always love you, and don’t you worry I’ll be here forever and ever. And that’s all that they will ever need to make it through.

 

/_\

 

They’re all sitting around at dinner, when the topic turns to epic first meetings.

“Natasha, how did you meet Clint?” Thor enquires with his mouth full of roast chicken. Their eyes meet, and simultaneously, both crack up laughing. 

“Is this about Budapest?” Pepper asks, and both of them laugh even harder. There’s an amused chuckle from Phil, but the rest of them are all just baffled. When the two of them finally stop laughing, they have tears in their eyes and they can’t look each other in the eye for fear of cracking up again.

“So it happens this way,” Clint begins. “I’m sent to capture this agent called Natalia Aliana Romanova. She’s deemed to be someone dangerous to our regime, but anyway, I’m supposed to capture and kill her. But when I get there, I first have to find her, and it’s hell trying to find her. I trek through the city for seventeen days before finding her, and when I find her, it’s in the middle of a massive firefight. She’s shooting from a vantage point on a roof and taking out numerous enemy agents when suddenly I see her literally jump down the fire escape. I vault the roofs to peer over the edge, and I see her protecting a grandmother and a little boy on the pavement, and hurrying them along into a building. Then she turns and spots me with an arrow pointing at her eye, and she knows she’s fucked. But she fires at me, and she misses and it goes into my shoulder.” 

“I didn’t miss,” Natasha interrupts. “I was aiming for your shoulder.”

“I know,” Clint agrees with a roll of his eyes. 

“So I realise there’s something up. She isn’t supposed to miss. So I lie flat on the roof and lazily pick off the enemies she’s fighting until she comes back up onto the roof.”

“At this point, I come up, and I proceed to trash him,” Natasha speaks up, ignoring Clint’s indignant squawks. 

“I put down my gun, he puts down his bow and arrows, and we fight hand to hand until I have him pinned. Then he brings his knees to his chest and fucking flips to his feet and rolls away!”

“Of course I did,” Clint interjects smugly. “I was trained in a circus full of men who taught me how to protect myself.”

“And after this is the part where we both disagree,” Natasha says, shaking her head. “We can never agree as to who won that fight.”

“But the SHIELD helicopter comes and lands on the roof, forcing you two to stand down,” Phil fills in for the rest. “And SHIELD makes Natalia Aliana Romanova into Agent Natasha Romanov.”

“That was the beginning of a long partnership,” Natasha ruminates. Then, there’s a gleam in her eye. “I can only think of two other such partnerships – Clint and Phil, or Tony and Pepper.”

“Oh, it’s definitely I and Pepper who had the longest one,” Tony says with a roll of his eyes. “We’ve known each other since she was nineteen.”

“That is longer than I would have thought,” Bruce says. 

“How did you meet her anyway?” Steve asks, curious. 

“Oh, at a club,” Tony teases. Pepper blushes and glares, while Natasha privately chuckles because a blushing Pepper is totally cute.

“Definitely not at a club,” Pepper retorts. “Unless you call your computer server mainframe a club.”

“I know not about this computer server mainframe,” Thor said, puzzled.

“Think of it as a huge, huge machine. It controls all the rest of my computers and my systems,” Tony explained. 

“I do not understand how you could have met Lady Pepper there, Man of Iron,” Thor said, even more befuddled than before. 

“Maybe I’ll let Pepper tell the story,” Tony said, his eyes gleaming wickedly. 

“Must you persist in my humiliation, Tony?” She groaned good-naturedly, putting her head in her hand. “I’ll sic Natasha on you. Just kidding!” She added, and the rest of them laughed as Tony clutched protectively at his balls.

“So, I was nineteen, ambitious, and I had a job. One of my contacts online offered me tens of thousands to hack into the Stark Industries mainframe and steal their information. I’d never been offered such a bounty before, and neither had I taken on such a challenge in the past, so I accepted.”

“To credit Pepper, she got well inside and began downloading quite a lot of information already,” Tony informed the rest. “She even managed to cover her tracks quite well and avoid the intruder alert software. But she triggered the alarm I’d set for the nuclear plans, and then I tracked her down to MIT. Bit of a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me there, though I’d graduated before I was nineteen.”

“Stop showing off, Tony,” Steve says and swats his hand. Bruce just rolls his eyes at Tony’s mock pout.

“When I opened my room door, I was, frankly, petrified. It was a bad day – for the information I gave, I only got a fraction of the original promised sum, and another person pulled me out of the job they originally assigned to me. And then the CEO of Stark Industries shows up on my doorstep, and I was expecting a slap and a trip down to the local jail in cuffs.”

“Instead, I offered her a job!” Tony sing-songs, rubbing his hands together. “Aren’t I benevolent?”

“But the role of secretary and personal assistant was not even congruent with your skill set,” Bruce said.

“Sooooo, I hired her as my security analyst!” Tony adds with a flourish. The rest of the table just stare at Pepper.

“You were a computer hacker, and none of us knew?” 

“I knew,” says Phil, but Clint glares at him. 

“That’s because you know everything!”

“Omniscient Phil,” Steve comments as the table erupts in laughter.

“I never knew you had such talents,” Natasha says as she strokes Pepper’s cheek. “The next time I have a mission that requires me to hack into some mainframe, I’m going to take you along.” 

The table of superheroes laughs again. 

“We met in an equally unorthodox place and position,” Phil says, looking at Clint lovingly. And the evening continued on, with good food, exotic and entertaining stories in abundance, and the joyful laughter of the Avengers filling the night air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, Thor. It might be a little late because I'm anticipating trouble, with the plot and the feelings and Thor himself (because I can't seem to write a convincing Thor). See y'all!


	8. Of Liking Both Men and Women, and Iago in opera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your continued support! This week continues like last week - bad - and writing this, and seeing all your encouraging comments is what keeps me feeling moderately sane and not from spiralling downwards.
> 
> 4083 words for this one. This is, once again, semi-cathartic. Thor's worries in the first half are somewhat like my own, and everything that he says about Asgard is not true. I made it up. I don't know how Asgardians view homosexuality, but for the purpose of this chapter, it shall be this way.

Thor was conflicted.

He was troubled – he wasn’t sure whether he was the problem, or whether it was Asgard that was the problem, or his understanding of modern Midgardian culture that was the problem – but either way, he decided to seek out answers.

He went to talk to Steve.

“Captain of America,” he said, his booming voice echoing across the vast gym as he entered and went over to Steve. Steve glanced over awkwardly, because he was in the midst of gulping down water, then capped the bottle and waved.

“Hello, Thor,” Steve said genially. He waits for Thor to speak, because it’s obvious that Thor has something on his mind. Thor would normally come running in and immediately invite him to spar, but there was something different that Thor had wanted today. So he sits down on the bench, and pats the space next to him. Thor plops down gratefully, and works his jaw for a while, mustering up the guts for whatever it is that he wants to say.

“I wanted to enquire,” Thor says slowly, almost painfully, “About your relationship with Bruce Banner and with the Man of Iron.” Steve stills. He knows he’s in an unconventional relationship, but was Thor really asking him for relationship advice now? Or was he (Steve fervently hoped not) seeking sex tips for a threesome? And Steve hopes, most of all, that Thor is not here to express his disapproval.

“I wish to know,” Thor continues, the words falling with great effort from his mouth. “I wish to know if relationships… Between men, be it two or three men, are common and accepted in Midgard.” 

Steve is flabbergasted.

He certainly wasn’t expecting that.

It takes him a while to compose his thoughts into something coherent and something that accurately expresses what he feels and what the world thinks nowadays. Thankfully, Thor is patient, and he doesn’t pressure Steve into giving him a quick answer. He just sits, and waits, and stares at the opposite wall and the row of punching bags lined up against the wall.

“It depends,” Steve finally says. “I think, or so I believe, that homosexual relationships have existed since the dawn of time. Some great kings like Alexander the Great were known to engage in relationships with men. The ancient Greek Spartans had older men mentor younger men in the military, and they were often not just mentor and mentee but also lovers. However, there are also religious conflicts, such as in the Bible, and in other faiths as well. So some people think that homosexual relationships, be they between man and man, or woman and woman, are sinful and wrong. But there are certainly also those who think that there is nothing wrong with it and that it is perfectly alright.” Steve waited with baited breath for Thor’s answer. Thor seemed tense and anxious, and it was obvious that the huge muscles in his shoulders were tight, reflecting his own mental state of confusion.

“But are there more people who think that it is normal, or are there more opponents who believe the worst of people who choose such a lifestyle?” Steve inhaled quickly. It was a tough question. And it was even tougher for him to think about how to go about tactfully correcting Thor on his perception that sexual orientation was a choice.

“Thor, I need to correct you on something before I proceed. Liking someone… Being attracted to someone is not a choice that you make. We don’t choose to like people of a certain gender.” Thor let out a huge whoosh of breath, his relief clear and starkly writ on his face. 

“I was afraid,” he admits frankly. “I had heard people saying on the street that liking someone of the same gender was a choice that one made, and I was… Thank you. Thank you for correcting me.”

“No problem,” Steve says gently. This might be easier than I think, Steve tells himself. He’s relieved too, because Thor is a good friend to him and he didn’t want to lose Thor if he didn’t agree with his point of view.

“I don’t know exactly how many people think that being gay is normal. But what I can tell you for sure is that people’s attitudes have changed a lot since I was growing up, and it’s definitely changed since the 40’s. They’ve changed for the better. Let me tell you how I know – I found out when I was having a conversation with Tony, Natasha, Clint and Phil…”

-+-

“Stark, you really have to stop this,” Phil sighs as he walks into the kitchen where Clint, Natasha, Tony and Steve are all having breakfast. He sets down the newspaper right next to Tony’s plate, and Steve sees it because he’s next to Tony.

“STARK INDUSTRIES CEO IN A FLING WITH YET ANOTHER MAN”, the headline proclaims, and there’s a close up picture of Tony kissing another man, looking drunk off his ass. Steve nearly chokes on his eggs, and takes a quick gulp of coffee to cover it up.

“It’s not good for the image of the Avengers,” Phil berates, although his tone tells them that he knows Tony is incorrigible.

“What, the man thing?” Tony retorts casually, downing his scalding coffee and getting up to pour himself another.

“No, the fucking around like a bunny thing,” Natasha snarks, and Clint snorts into his own coffee mug.

“But the newspapers said last week that you were a regular womaniser,” Steve blurts out, genuinely confused. Natasha, Clint and Tony all laugh, and Phil’s mouth even quirks up on one side in an imitation of a smile. 

“I swing both ways,” Tony says breezily. “Best of both worlds that way.” Steve isn’t quite caught up with twenty-first century jargon, but “best of both worlds” is kind of hard to misunderstand. Tony Stark fucks both men and women, and Steve is honestly just a little… Well, his heart is a jumble of feelings, and he doesn’t know how he feels.

“I thought they would have found a cure for that by now,” he murmurs, picking at the remains of his eggs. 

“For what, for being gay?” Tony turns around and says sharply, his coffee sloshing a little over the side of his mug from the speed of his turn. Steve blushes and burns red, because he realises that he’s probably overstepped a boundary somewhere that he’s not aware of, and fuck it, what did he just do?

“Being gay – or lesbian or bisexual or transgender or anything-sexual – isn’t a disease that needs to be cured, Steve,” Clint says flatly, his own eyes boring a hole in Steve from across the damn table. Steve’s heart is thudding painfully and loudly in his chest, and he can’t stop the feelings that translate stupidly to words that come flying out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“Well forgive me for thinking that it is!” Steve nearly shouts, his fork clattering to the side of his plate. “Maybe because when I tried to enlist five different times, each time I saw this placard on the wall saying that if you had any of the following conditions you could forget about enlisting, and besides asthma and the rest of the bodily illnesses I also saw homosexuality, and that made me think it was a disease! Maybe it’s because I had to hide who I was to even survive back then, because you fucking well got beaten up and killed by people in your neighbourhood if you were gay, and I was just a ninety pound weakling who would die at the first blow!” 

And fuck. Because he’s just outed himself. Captain America is gay, now half of the Avengers know, and he is so fucking dead. Steve pushes his chair back and rises, starting to stumble blindly through the haze of tears towards the door, but there’s a hand on his arm and familiar voices around him. The hand turns out to be Natasha’s and it guides him, slowly and patiently, back to his chair and sits him down while he’s just trying to breathe through the feelings in his chest. The hand pets his head gently, and then there’s another hand running through his hair. This hand is larger and rougher, and Steve blinks away the tears to look up and sees Tony, his face strangely naked and open and somehow, just broken.

“There’s nothing about you that you need to change, Steve. Being gay isn’t bad. It’s not a disease, and there’s nothing wrong or sick about you.” That’s Phil’s voice, and Steve knows that Phil’s probably the biggest fanboy of Captain America ever, but Phil called him Steve, so he knows that Phil’s speaking to him as Phil Coulson to Steve Rogers, friend to friend.

“Thank you,” he rasps, swallowing down the rest of his tears and the boulder in his throat. Then they’re all silent for a while, and there’s just Natasha’s hand petting his head and smoothing over his hair while Tony’s is a warm weight on the side of his head. 

“I should go,” he says at last, when he feels like his voice isn’t too choked with tears anymore. Natasha’s hand stills, and he misses Tony’s warm, heavy hand. His mother used to put her hand on his head and pet him, or just touch him, especially when he was crying or upset or sick. It’s the first time since he awoke that someone touched him without it being a poke or a prod with some sort of equipment, and his heart is just in a fragile state of being right now.

“Will you be alright?” Clint asks, concern flavouring his voice. He knows that Steve isn’t alright right now, but he asks about the near foreseeable future, and for that Steve is glad. He would probably have just crushed his own heart to splinters if someone had asked him if he was fine right now. 

“I’ll be fine,” he answers, just a tad shakily. He forces his legs to carry him up, out of the seat and to the door, but not before he hears Tony say, “Howard was a homophobe.” Steve stops, pauses for a moment, but he doesn’t turn around. He’s afraid of what he’ll see on Tony’s face if he does.

“I’ll be in the lab if you want to talk, Steve.” 

It takes Steve two weeks, but two weeks later, he goes into the lab, softly kisses Tony on the lips, and leaves to wait for Tony’s answer.

-+-

“So people accept… People of the same gender having relationships now?” Thor asked after Steve had relived his tale.

“Somewhat,” Steve says with a sigh. “There are definitely great changes, like same-sex marriage being legalized in six out of our fifty states, and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy being repealed in our army. But at the same time, there will always be people who fear non-heterosexual people because they’re different, and this fear will spur them to do things that are cruel, unkind, and hateful.”

“I see,” Thor says. There’s a very long pause, and both of them just sit side by side on the bench, one warrior next to another, just thinking.

“It is different, and worse, on Asgard,” Thor finally contributes. “It is different. Only relationships between women and men are accepted. To have a relationship between one man and another is considered to be weak and unbefitting of a warrior, and it disgraces not only you, but the family name and all the warriors who fight at your side. But the reverse, relationships between women, are seen as something that is a little sacred. You may perceive us as odd, but in Asgard, women having intercourse with each other is seen as something that in Midgardian language is… Hot? Sexy? It is considered to be something arousing for men, and it is not condemned as long as the women also consent to have intercourse with men.”

“That must be incredibly difficult,” Steve says in an attempt to comfort. He can clearly see that Thor is uncomfortable with the situation, but he doesn’t know what to say either.

“I think I much prefer the attitudes of Midgardians,” Thor says softly. There’s another silence again, until Thor slowly, awkwardly opens his mouth again.

“I do not know what to think of myself,” Thor blurts, and then he cups his hand over his mouth as if to pull back the words that have already spilled forth. But he releases it, unable to hold back the torrent of emotions that have been pent up for decades, centuries, and it all comes out in a gush.

“When I was young, the equivalent of your eighteen years of age, Loki was the equivalent of your sixteen, and… And it happened. Between us. He did not change into a woman, and he did not seduce me, but it just happened one day after he had sparred with me and had me running around, panting from the effort of blocking the projectiles from his spells. We never spoke of it again, and it did not happen again until the day that he found out that he was not a biological son of Odin. It happened then because we were attracted, to each other, and we were no longer brothers. But I was hesitant, and I believed too strongly in Asgardian values. It was only until I came to Midgard that I then began believing that there was a possibility of such a relationship being considered… Normal. And that… There was actually nothing wrong with liking both men and women.” Thor buries his head in his hands, and his breaths are deep and forcefully calm. Steve puts his hand tentatively on Thor’s back, and leaves it there. 

“How is Loki?” Steve asks, finally.

“He is imprisoned in Asgard,” Thor answers, his voice sorrowful. “He does not seem to be doing well. He eats, but has grown thin. He does not wish to move, to even read or glance at the books that Odin has permitted him to have. His lips were sewn shut -” At this, Steve suppresses a gasp of horror, and Thor inhales so sharply that he seems to suck up all the oxygen around them.

“I know, it is barbaric, and I attempted to dissuade Father from doing so, but he was adamant. He amended it, however, by making it such that Loki can only tell the truth or face the pain of his lips being sewn shut. Loki lies there on the cot of the cell, eats when he is brought food and told to eat, but otherwise, he does nothing. I know not what he thinks, nor what he feels, for he refuses to speak to me. I attempted to rekindle what we had by bringing my lips to his, but he did not respond. And – and I saw scars and fresh wounds on his body, similar to that of Bruce Banner’s, and I believe he came by them the same way. It hurts my heart to see him in such a condition, yet what can I do?” Thor’s voice breaks on the last word, and Steve sees him visibly struggle to contain himself. Thor stands, thanks Steve for his help, and flees.

-+-

A week later, Thor clears his throat at dinner.

“I would like to say something,” he declares, putting down his fork and knife such that they don’t clatter against his plate and betray his nervousness. Thor takes a couple of deep breaths to calm himself so that his words don’t trip him up.

“I, Thor Odinson, am sexually attracted to both men and women,” he said, and waited for the explosion.

The explosion never came.

“Okay,” Bruce casually tossed out. The rest just shrugged and said some variant of it, and turned their attention back to their dinner plates.

“That was your announcement, big boy?” Tony questions. “That’s it?” Thor was stunned. What did Tony mean by ‘that’s it’?

“Is it not a piece of startling news?” Thor enquires, clearly perplexed. 

“We never knew that, Thor, but it isn’t a revelation to us,” explained Pepper. 

“Did I… Did I give some, some hint that I was…” Thor stutters, frantically going through worst-case scenarios in his head. Did he appear effeminate? He was pretty certain that he was not the limp-wristed type of man, so that could be ruled out. Oh, right, glances and gestures and… Did he look at someone’s ass for a second too long? Or did he not look at someone’s ass? Or should he have been looking at breasts more to cover up? God, what had he done?

“Thor, in case you haven’t noticed, none of us are heterosexual,” Phil notes. “Clint and I are in a relationship, as are Tony and Steve and Bruce, and also Natasha and Pepper. None of us are in relationships with people of the opposite gender at the moment.” 

“I had not noticed,” Thor says in amazement.

“That’s why we think it’s not out of the norm,” Steve comments. Bruce and Tony smile at him proudly, like proud parent penguins watching their baby penguin swim and waddle, and Bruce leans over to kiss him sweetly on the cheek.

“In Asgard, it is not the same,” Thor says, his tone still that of wonderment and revelation. “In Asgard, I would be disowned or risk having my family persecuted. I would probably have been exiled to some far-flung realm. But here, there are people like you, who are not all that different from I, and you do not mind me the way I am. Thank you very much, indeed.”

“You’re welcome,” replies Natasha, and gives him one of her rare smiles. 

“There’s nothing wrong about being non-heterosexual,” Tony says with his mouth full of food. “You’re still the same person, regardless of whoever you’re attracted to.” 

“Swallow first before speaking,” Steve and Bruce both chide Tony simultaneously, and everyone laughs. Thor laughs too, but his laughter now really buoys him and his self-perception up. There’s nothing wrong with me, Thor thinks. There’s really nothing wrong with me.

 

/_\

 

Once again, something odd was happening in Avengers Tower. 

“Thor isn’t in the tower again,” Tony griped. “I was hoping to trap some of the lightning from Mjolnir in the special containing chamber I designed and built.”

“Well, you could continue attempting to recreate the gamma cells in me,” Bruce says placidly, and Tony goes “Yes, yes, yes!” like an overgrown puppy, and kisses Bruce sloppily before he gets back to work.

At any rate, Thor was missing from Avengers Tower… Again.

He had been going missing about once or twice a week some time ago, and he had claimed that he was exploring the city. However, now he was missing almost daily and, well, there was only so much walking that one could do. Even if one was a Norse god who was exploring a new planet.

At any rate, the mystery was solved when Thor was still not back for dinner. The Avengers were at the dinner table, and Phil came in uncharacteristically late. He strode in, and held up a flyer triumphantly.

“I have solved the mystery of where Thor has been going recently,” he announces, and the Avengers all gawp in shock and surprise at the flyer that he’s holding up.

“The New York City Opera is proud to present ‘Otello’, an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy by Verdi,” Tony read aloud. “What does this have to do with Thor and where he’s been gallivanting to?”

“Read further,” Phil says smugly, and Bruce leans in to take a closer look at the smaller printing near the bottom of the paper.

“And, joining us for the first time in the role of Iago – Thor Odinson!” Bruce reads, squinting.

“Thor can sing?” Natasha says in bemusement. 

“We’ll find out,” Phil promises, and he pulls out seven tickets from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. Tony cheers, and Clint goes over to pull Phil into a long kiss.

Thor’s voice is rich, deep and smooth, they find out. It’s beautiful. Iago is the antagonist in this opera, and they find that Thor is able to convey the rage, bitterness and jealousy of Iago very convincingly. But it’s tinged with a side of sadness that none of them expect, and they’re not sure if the rest of the audience pick it up. It’s almost imperceptible, but they know Thor, and they recognise it for what it is.

“That was sublime,” compliments Phil, as they lounge around on the sofas in the kitchen, with their own respective hot mugs of coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Thor thanks Phil, but everyone can see that his heart is not in it. It’s painfully obvious as Thor takes a small sip of his hot chocolate. Because it’s Thor, who does everything in huge leaps and bounds and is usually overflowing with energy. So Natasha, sharp as she is, asks the question.

“Were you thinking of Loki, Thor?” A sigh rattles its way out of Thor’s huge frame, and he stares into the still-almost-full mug with its sides stained by light brown foam, and the little half-melted marshmallows stubbornly floating on the top. He nods slowly, and it’s as if they could see the guilt, regret and unhappiness radiate off him in visible waves.

“That was not the first time I had sung Otello,” he begins, sadness colouring his voice and giving it an unhappy timbre. 

“Loki and I had sung Otello before, together. I took the part of Othello, Cassio, Roderigo, Lodovico and Montano, while Loki – he had a range that allowed him to play not only Iago, but also Emilia and Desdemona. We often sung operas together as young men. Tonight was an untimely reminder of how far we have grown apart.”

“Tonight, I also chose to sing the part of Iago. I was not very familiar with it, but I chose it because Iago was the antagonist. I wanted to feel, for once, what Loki feels as he plots for something others consider subversive, to have his plans succeed and then fail. I wanted to understand how Loki could do such terrible things. But tonight also reminded me of how he is now unable to do such things, and I do not know if he will ever recover from his current state enough to be up to mischief again, or whether I will have my heart crushed as I helplessly watch him die.”

“My brother is not well,” he says. “On my last visit only one week ago, he had thinned until I picked up his wrist and could feel bone. I implore him to eat, but he barely has any energy to sit up, let alone chew and swallow, and it pains me to see him lie there on the cot in the cell in Asgard’s dungeons and stare blankly at the rotting ceiling or sleep the day away. And to my horror, I had discovered numerous scars on his body which had not been there when I last lay with him after he discovered that he was not borne of Odin and Frigga. They – they - ” And here is where Thor chokes and buries his head in his hands, tears leaking from him.

“I think that he may have done it to himself,” he gasps, and they all stiffen. The atmosphere changes perceptibly, and there is suddenly sympathy and empathy emitting from the rest of the room, heading towards Thor.

“He may be severely depressed, Thor,” Bruce begins, swallowing and trying valiantly to keep his voice on an even keel.

“Will you go with me and plead with my father, Bruce Banner?” Thor pleads, his voice cracking and Bruce hears the unspoken ‘please, for me, for him, and for our sanity’.

“I will, and I’ll bring the rest along if need be,” he promises. Thor nods shakily and scrubs a hand over his face.

“Thank you for coming to see me perform tonight,” Thor says, and rises to his feet. “I should retire to my chambers. Thank you for your promise, Bruce Banner. Thank you all for tonight.” He starts to walk out, leaving his half-empty cup forlornly abandoned on the coffee table.

Thor’s pain-filled sobs are audible as he leaves the room, fading with the sound of his heavy footsteps as he walks further and further away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I envisioned Thor to be a baritone, so I gave him the part of Iago. Othello, actually, is one of my A level lit texts, so I have read the text, watched the play and I heard bits and pieces of the opera on youtube. 
> 
> The next chapter will be pretty difficult but entirely cathartic and soul-pouring for me to write, so it might not get done in one day. Anyway, see y'all in the next chapter with tons and tons of Loki angst!


	9. Of Hating and Hurting Yourself, part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about this - it's going to be longer than the initially planned nine chapters. It's going to be about eleven, if I manage to get Loki's chapter done within the next part and fit in an epilogue maybe. Or the seeds for a sequel.
> 
> Plot-wise, I'm slightly stuck as to how to structure what happens next. Anyway, I got news today that I'm eligible to re-sit my exams in three weeks and hope that I pass. So I'll be boning my ass off (not having lots of sex, I mean that I'll be studying) but I'll definitely be devoting time to writing too.

“Father,” Thor says solemnly, “This is Bruce Banner, a member of the fearsome Avengers upon Midgard.” 

Bruce smiles and bows, and he feels Odin’s gaze rake him over, and the ripple washes over him as Odin’s gaze penetrates his mind. 

“Why have you brought me Bruce Banner?” Odin questions his son. Thor takes a deep breath. It’s now or never. It’s do it now or watch Loki die.

“Loki is not in any ordinary state of melancholy, Father. On Midgard, there are healers who have studied the art of the mind very closely, and Bruce Banner has studied this art. He says that Loki is in a severe depression, a severe state of melancholia, and he is in danger.”

“You may be assured that Loki is in no danger,” Odin’s deep voice rumbles. “I have guards posted at his cell door, and there is no other way in but the door. They will guard him well.”

“With all due respect, All-Father,” Bruce speaks up, “Loki is not in danger from outside forces. He is at danger from himself.” There’s an astonished gasp from the spectators in the court, and a buzz of voices immediately starts up.

“Quiet,” Odin says authoritatively, and the buzz falls silent. But the damage already has been done, and Bruce sees a few men quietly slip out of the main hall’s huge, ornate doors. Probably to spread the news, he thinks ruefully. But Odin is speaking again, so Bruce refocuses his attention.

“You mean that Loki has the intention to end his life by his own hand?” Odin says, concealed within his voice just the barest hint of a steely threat. Bruce looks him back straight in the eye, and chooses his next words very carefully.

“I have reason to believe so,” Bruce says. “Loki is clearly in a severe depression – Thor can attest to the fact that Loki has barely the energy to sit up, let alone eat, and has withered away to little more than skin and bones. He will die at this rate, without sustenance. Furthermore, if he does not die of the lack of nourishment, he will die by his own hand. Thor has observed that Loki may have been injuring his own body. I believe that if starvation does not kill him first, he kill himself first.”

The buzzing in the court begins anew, reacting to this piece of information from Bruce. There are people talking loudly all around, and somehow, the sound doesn’t seem quite right. It doesn’t sound like people who are concerned about their prince, thinks Bruce. The noise swells, and then he catches hints of it. ‘Had it coming to him, that brat’, ‘Should have imprisoned him a long time ago’, and ‘Why even care about some Jotun runt who should have perished from the beginning’ are just some of the malicious words swirling through the court, and Bruce shudders, because what the fuck is this? Wasn’t Loki Thor’s brother and also a prince? Why did the people hate him this much?

“LEAVE!” Odin thunders, banging his sceptre furiously. 

“Empty the hall!” At his hand signal, the guards begin to move and herd the spectators out of the hall. In a matter of minutes, the hall is cleared of people.

“Leave us,” Odin dismisses the guards. There are some mumblings that rise up, but they all scatter at Odin’s sharp glare. Odin leans his sceptre against the side of his throne, and his gaze goes past Bruce, past Thor, to fixate on the ornate doors. Bruce looks at Thor, and Thor signals for him to wait. Odin appears to be pondering, and Bruce allows himself to think about what Odin could be ruminating about. He was sure the king had heard the vicious murmurs of the court, and he could not have been oblivious to the dissent the people felt against his younger son. Perhaps Odin was wondering how things had gotten that bad? Bruce certainly hoped that Odin was thinking very hard about how to save his younger son.

“What is depression, Bruce Banner?” Odin finally asks. And Bruce realises with a start that the healers on Asgard have probably never studied the arts of the mind.

“Depression,” Bruce carefully says, “Is an illness that afflicts anyone. It is primarily an affliction of the mind, and is a state of melancholia which affects a person’s thoughts, feelings, moods, actions and their well being. When someone is depressed, they may lose interest in activities that they once found pleasurable, and they might have abnormal sleeping and eating habits. I believe what Loki has is major depressive disorder, also known as clinical depression. That occurs when depression is severe enough to be disabling for the person and disrupts their daily life and activities.”

“I do not understand why Loki would fall into such a state,” Odin then pronounces, his piercing gaze drilling into Bruce’s eyes. Bruce swallows, because he knows it’s going to be hard to convince this mighty warrior that his son is indeed ill, and although it’s a mental illness that’s properly classified in the DSM… It’s not due to a weakness of the mind.

“It is not because of any weakness on his part,” Bruce clarifies first. He needs to make Odin see that Loki needs help, and that’s what he’s going to try his motherfucking best to do.

“I believe, in fact, that Loki’s depression is actually due to an accumulation of feelings from his childhood. Thor has informed me that since Loki was a young child, he was not the favoured prince. That was mainly because he did not excel at being the traditional warrior – he was not enamoured with fighting with weapons, or at using brute force, but rather preferred spells and words. Loki was strikingly different from the rest of the males here, as he is slim and slender while the rest of the men and the boys are very well muscled. Loki has always been the odd one out, and I believe that contributed to his sense of unease in Asgard, and the need to prove himself.”

“Loki is disliked by the people of Asgard because he is a trickster, and because he weaves lies and is distrustful,” Odin rumbles, but Bruce senses that niggling shadow of doubt in Odin’s token protest.

“Loki does not have the same talents that the bulk of Asgard has. Thor says that on Asgard, people perceive him to have skills that they are uncomfortable with. I believe that Loki’s tricks and pranks are in fact his own method of trying to prove that his methods of fighting are in fact just as equal and effective as what Thor uses.”

“That may be the reason for why Loki plays pranks. I do understand what you explained. However, that does not explain why you believe him to be in this purported depressive mood.” Bruce gritted his teeth and deliberately looked down at the floor to avoid accidentally killing Odin with his eyes. Did this man, this pathetic excuse for a father, want him to lay out all the reasons right under his nose? Odin could not possibly be a dumb man. Why did he not understand the ramifications of how Loki was treated and how he was perceived? How could he not even see with his own two eyes that something was terribly wrong with Loki?

“From the very beginning, Loki’s own innate talents were discredited by Asgardians. He is regarded as a dark person, a force of evil, simply because of what comes naturally to him and what should actually be seen as simply an alternate, equally effective and useful form of fighting. Loki tried to show you all how clever he was through his tricks, but instead he was cruelly punished without anyone realising his true potential. When someone is ridiculed endlessly, and rejected and tormented by the bulk of society, that person usually winds up feeling like they are absolutely nothing. They feel like whatever they do will never amount to anything, and that they’re unquestionably worthless. They could even begin to hate themselves, and that is undeniably the worst thing that they could possibly do.” 

Bruce’s chest is heaving from the force of his emotion, he’s panting and gulping in the cool air, and he’s fighting and fighting to contain everything from spilling out. Was he speaking for himself? Or was he speaking for Loki? Did it even matter who he was fighting for anymore?

“And that is what happened to Loki,” a cool, feminine voice says, and Bruce snaps his head up to see Frigga regarding him from her throne next to Thor, and he’s just glad that somebody, somebody in this damn room even understands what they’ve all done to Loki.

“I confess that I have not seen my son in nearly two weeks,” Frigga says, and Bruce can feel the regret creeping into her voice.

“If we go and see him now, you will see what I mean,” proposes Bruce, and he’s desperately hoping that Odin will consent and that he will finally see what in the name of fucking hell is happening to his son. Because they need to save Loki before it’s too late.

“We shall proceed. Thor, lead the way,” Odin announces, his voice gravelly and foreboding, and all of them troop down to the dungeon cells, unaware of the unpleasant surprise that lay ahead.

-+-

“Guards! Get me healers,” Frigga commands authoritatively, and they leap to do her bidding, already knowing full well that they would be reprimanded for being remiss in their duties. She takes a step forward, and she lays a gentle hand on Odin’s shoulder. Odin is standing, numb with shock and horror, and his head turns slowly to face her. There are no tears, but there is emotion writ clear on the lines of his face. “This is my fault,” Odin says, and he does not speak for the rest of the day.

Thor is inside the cell. He’d broken down the bars with Mjolnir, and Bruce and he have stripped themselves of their shirts and are binding their shirts tightly around Loki’s forearms. Next to Loki’s prone body is a piece of wood broken off the cot frame, sharpened meticulously against the stone floor. There are tears running down both their faces, and the floor is awash with blood. 

-+-

“Of course you can bring Loki back,” Tony blurts, his face uncharacteristically grave as he faces the screen that displays Bruce’s and Thor’s tear-stained faces. He reaches his hand out to splay his fingers on the screen, and Bruce does likewise.

“I’ll prepare a room for him,” Tony promises. “He doesn’t deserve a cell. He should have a room.”

“I’ll conceal this from Fury,” Phil says solemnly. The rest of the Avengers are mute in horror at what Loki had done to himself, because Bruce set up the live stream in the healing chambers, where Loki is currently inside a bubble. It’s a sterile bubble that prevents any diseases or germs from entering to poison Loki, and there are ethereal thin streams of what Thor says are nutrients and blood entering Loki. Odin has lifted the block on Loki’s magic, and there slowly, hour by hour, Bruce and Thor sit by Loki and watch the magic knit the huge gashes that ravage Loki’s forearms. The healers can feed Loki’s body, they can replenish his store of blood, but they cannot heal what Loki does not want healed. 

Loki’s willpower, after all this, is still going strong. And this is the only thing that Bruce and Thor can be sure of, now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was depressing. No happy ending either, like Thor's chapter. But there should? could? be more tomorrow and Friday. :)


	10. Chapter Nine, part two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's really a joy to see the emails from AO3 that say I've got kudos! Thank you all!
> 
> Gosh. I'd planned eight scenes after that initial part one, but it was a little tiring and draining to write. So I'm divvying them up into three parts. Here are the first two scenes!

1\. 

Thor looks down at his brother, small and tiny and curled up on the sterile, starkly white sheets of the SHIELD infirmary cot. He’s never seen Loki look so fragile. Or rather, Loki has looked so breakable ever since they found him bleeding out on the floor of the cell back in the dungeons in Asgard. It was a week before the healers deemed him sufficiently stable to brave the travel through the Bifrost, and Thor had cradled his brother protectively to his chest every single step of the way, hoping that he could protect him but yet simultaneously, achingly, afraid that he would break him. Loki has not stopped looking that vulnerable since. 

Loki has been mainly unresponsive. He hasn’t been unconscious all the time. Loki was awake about a quarter of the time, and once or twice he made fleeting eye contact. But immediately after catching someone’s eye, he would drop his gaze and Tony swore he could see a shutter coming down over his face. But actually, Loki just sleeps all the time or keeps his eyes closed, and no one knows when he’s actually awake or not.

He sucks in a deep breath. 

“Brother,” Thor says. “Loki.” He feels a little silly, talking to an unresponsive inert form lying so still, but he pushes the feeling all the way down. He has a task to do.

“Loki, you are in the healing chambers of SHIELD. I will transport you back to Avengers Tower, back to your chambers, and I will bathe you. Brother, I am going to lift you into my arms now.” Gently, he reaches out for Loki’s sticky and unwashed form, forcing his heart to stay intact through sheer willpower.

But not before he tenderly moves a wayward clump of greasy hair out of Loki’s eyes, and Thor barely stops himself from kissing Loki.

Back at Avengers Tower, and in Loki’s bathroom, he carefully sets his brother down in the bathtub and sets about stripping off the SHIELD infirmary issue scrubs. He cries as he does so, because as careful and as lightly as he moves, he still can’t avoid the cuts on Loki’s limbs and torso. Everything catches on Loki’s wounds, and by the time he has finished undressing him, almost every single laceration is bleeding again. He curses himself, he curses Asgard, he curses Loki for not telling him, himself and Odin and Frigga and the Warriors Three and the Avengers for not noticing and he spends a good minute just smashing his fists into the floor. It hurts, but at least the floor is unbreakable because the tiles are specially Stark-made. Finally he turns on the warm water, takes a clean hand towel from the rack and dabs at Loki’s self-inflicted injuries. His heart weeps tears just like the blood that is sluggishly seeping from his brother, and there is a dagger driven into his fucking chest every single time the white cloth comes away red.

“I am going to shampoo you hair, Brother,” Thor informs Loki. “I would bid you to shut your eyes, but your eyes are not open. I have not seen your eyes in a while, Loki, and it would reassure me greatly if I were to do so. I do not even know if you be asleep or awake.” Loki does not answer, but as Thor lathers his brother’s thick, ebony locks, he finds it somewhat comforting to keep up the one-sided patter.

“Father did not speak for an entire day after we found you,” Thor says as he runs a bar of mild soap over his brother’s broken, delicate body. “He blames himself for not being sufficiently astute to see what none of us did. I, too, feel that I should have been more perceptive and less selfish. Mother says the same things as well. But the past cannot be undone, Brother, and there is nothing more that I can do but instead try to make it all right from this point onwards.”

Thor is done with bathing Loki, so he spreads a cushy floor mat on the floor next to the tub and lifts Loki out. But as he’s drying Loki with a fluffy white bath towel, there are spots of blood on the towel, strawberry pinpricks against a field of white. So he goes for the first aid kid under the sink, and pulls out gauze and tape and bandages the deepest cuts that have not scabbed over. 

Halfway through, Thor starts all over again, counting this time. He counts and he counts, going all over Loki’s arms and torso, and he is already into the hundreds. He stops at three hundred, because he’s not done with the torso and there are still Loki’s legs to go. There are too many, too many to count, and too many ways that Loki has in store to fucking crush and bury Thor’s heart. Loki’s still damp, but Thor hugs Loki’s skeletal frame tightly to his chest and heaves with the force of his tearless sobs. There are no more tears in him to be shed, and he feels worn and wrung out like an old dishtowel, on the verge of being discarded in the bin.

Thor runs his huge palms over Loki’s scars and his wounds, wondering how Loki could have been doing this since… Hell, no one knew when, and Bruce said that he couldn’t even estimate it since Loki apparently could keep them from healing with his own magic and willpower. There are deep scars, there are shallow scars, there are half-healed, scabbed over and healing wounds and there are the latest wounds that are still leaking blood in angry red drops standing out in stark relief against the alabaster white of Loki’s skin. Thor wraps bandages and presses gauze to Loki, and he wishes someone would do the same for his heart and his soul.

Thor doesn’t see it as he dresses Loki in comfy sweats and a long sleeved tee, but the deepest of the gashes on Loki are beginning to knit and close beneath the bandages, and Loki’s mind is dripping tears.

 

 

2\. 

“You need to let him have his own room and have the door closed,” Bruce insists. “You need to put his belongings in the room, not put any restraints on him, and give the time and the space to rest and heal. Loki needs the privacy if he is supposed to trust any of us.”

“Okay, fine,” Phil reluctantly agrees. 

“JARVIS has eyes everywhere,” Tony reminds them. “JARVIS will alert us before he can do much harm to himself anyway.”

“He’s in a crippling depression, I don’t see him getting up and doing things anytime soon,” Clint remarked snidely, earning a pinch from Natasha for his non-contribution.

They were so wrong.

It took nearly four months for Loki to sink into a near-catatonic state when he was imprisoned in Asgard. It took only two weeks for Loki to begin coming out of it. When he began staying awake for longer periods of time and being more aware of his surroundings, Bruce had told Thor that he could only mope at Loki’s bedside and spend time with him for up to three or four hours a day. It was an arbitrary number, but Bruce and Thor concurred that Loki was an intensely private individual who needed time to be awake and alone on his own. 

After two weeks of being in Avengers Tower, Loki began to move around his room.

At first, he just sat in bed and looked out of the large window that overlooked the busy streets, just watching the people go by. Then he progressed to idly holding the books in his hands, carted all the way from his previous room in Asgard, then to actually reading the damn things, albeit at a glacial pace compared to his previous knowledge-starved speed.

The Avengers also come and visit him. Most of them, that is. Clint is the only one who doesn’t, but everyone understands why and no one forces him to. Not even Phil, who privately thinks that if Clint spends an hour screaming at Loki, it would do him a world of good, even if it sets Loki right back into a catatonic state.

Phil visits one day, with soft, gooey chocolate chip cookies. Loki can sense his arrival and his footsteps coming down the hallway. But what he senses today is the addition of another set of feet. The steps are light and measured, and yet distinctly male. It’s the archer, Clint, the one that he controlled. Loki viciously suppresses the stab of guilt that forks through him. He has to, if he wants to engage in any eye contact or conversation with Phil at all. The steps stop just outside his door, and he pushes himself to listen in on the whispered conversation.

“I wish you wouldn’t visit this monster.”

“Loki’s not a monster, Clint. He’s a human being just like the rest of us.”

“Don’t you remember? He stabbed his fucking sceptre into your goddamn heart. He almost killed you. He killed you, you were dead for fifteen minutes and three times in the ambulance!”

“Don’t try to make this about me. I know full well what he did. You mean, that he controlled you and made you do things that still give you nightmares.” There’s a silence. Loki doesn’t try to feel for how they’re standing, for how they’re touching each other. He knows that Phil is holding Clint, though, and he wonders if Thor still has feelings for him the way he used to. Or whether being raised as brothers killed off the possibility of anything between them.

“Yeah, it’s about that too,” Clint admits.

“Loki… I just wish I knew what I could do. I don’t know how else to try to help him.” Then there’s more silence, and Loki lets the rage and the guilt and the regret start budding tendrils in him.

“I’ll be back later,” Phil promises, and then there’s a soft knock on the door. The door opens, and Phil appears with a smile and a small container and the wafting aroma of freshly baked soft cookies.

“Thank you,” Loki says stiffly, and he gives short, one-sentence answers until Phil finally snaps. Well, as close to snapping as Phil can get, that is.

“Why did you do it?” Phil finally probes. Loki turns his head to the window, resolutely refusing to meet Phil’s probing gaze. 

“Go,” he bites out, tersely. Loki’s hands are curled into fists, and his fingernails are cutting into his palms, but he barely notices the pain. Phil gets up, hesitantly, and Loki snaps harshly again.

“I do not need your pity!” 

Phil leaves. 

Loki has not closely searched through the room. Now he does, flinging out clothes and books from drawers and shelves, rummaging through every item that could possibly contain a tool. There is no razor in the bathroom. There is no sewing kit with pins or needles upon the dresser. There is no box cutter among the stationery. In a fury, Loki upends a drawer. It slips from his grasp and falls onto his foot, and he nearly screams from the rage and the pure emotion coursing through his veins. 

Sinking to the floor, in the midst of all the debris, he claws at his shins. They are one of the only untouched parts of his body so far, and he thinks it an appropriate place for this particular session. He has not done this because of the sheer regret and guilt rushing through him before. There are now raw, angry weeping patches on his shins. He continues until there is blood dripping down, and the pain is a red angry haze that settles over everything and blanks out whatever he’s feeling.

A klaxon is sounding throughout the tower.

Steve bursts through the door, goggles at the sight of the trashed room, then reacts admirably by leaping over the mess to pull Loki’s hands away from himself and pinning him to the floor.

“Stop it, Loki,” he says fiercely, his voice strong, even as his heart quavers as he immobilises this deeply broken man beneath him.

“I need to excise the guilt!” Loki shouts, no longer giving a fuck about who hears him, about who knows why he does things sometimes, about why he wants to die. Because he has done such terrible, shitty things, that all never worked out and everything that he does will not succeed and he is nothing more than a failure, and his continued existence does not benefit anyone and he would be better off dead…

Thor runs in and nearly trips on the discarded drawer. 

“Loki!” He shouts, his distressed state apparent as he approaches his brother at the speed of sound. He cradles Loki’s head in his hands, watches his brother’s madly spitting mouth, his brother’s rage-contorted face, and feels the emotion throbbing through his vessels. 

Thor holds his head as Loki babbles, understandable yet insensible at times, spilling forth tales of how he never wanted this to end up this way, how his very conception was a mistake, and how much loathing he held for himself. Steve is gobsmacked too, because while he did know that Loki had attempted to kill himself, he had not understood the sheer force of emotions and deluges of thought that had prompted those actions. Loki crossed a line that night in Steve’s heart, no longer a person to be treated with caution for fear of betrayal, but instead, a person to be treated as an equal, and also to be protected fiercely like he would the rest of the Avengers.

Thor cries as his brother speaks, and after Steve leaves, crushes his brother to him. To his astonishment, he finds a hand curling loosely around his arm in a semblance of a hug.

There are tears dripping onto Thor’s shoulder, but both of them pretend not to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next parts will be less angsty. After all, Loki is not meant to die. He's supposed to get better. :)


	11. Chapter Nine, part three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over 5,000 views and 89 kudos. I am floored. *hits the deck* Thank you all!
> 
> Okay that aside, here's the story. Four more scenes split into two parts to come!
> 
> This starts with 3. and continues on to 4. and 5. because chapter nine part one was scenes 1 and 2. (Though now I have a very different connotation of 'scene' because of a Clint/Phil BDSM fic I read.)
> 
> Hope you all continue to like the Loki whump. :)

3\. 

It takes Bruce a while to work up the guts to visiting Loki. 

He’s put his own painful past behind him now. It’s just… Well, he found himself in the centre of the big bed after Steve and Tony found out that he was having flashbacks sometimes. He didn’t Hulk out in bed, but he did find himself waking up in a cold sweat. Having someone who had felt desperate enough and hated themselves enough to want to die around him was a pretty obvious trigger, so Steve and Tony put him firmly in the middle, in what they termed a ‘Brucie sandwich’.

But eventually, Bruce stopped having flashbacks or nightmares, and two weeks after Loki arrived at Avengers Tower, he worked up the nerve to visit him.

“How do you like it here?” Bruce asks awkwardly, after he enters the room and Loki absentmindedly (uncharacteristically, but the whole situation is just out of whack anyway) waves him to a chair.

“It’s fine,” Loki replies. He doesn’t mind this scientist, so he endeavours to talk a little bit more. There’s a little birdie in his brain telling him to be nice so that he doesn’t get kicked out of Avengers Tower like he got kicked out of Asgard. Yes, he tells the thing, then kills it because he doesn’t want to think about Asgard. Not right now. 

So, instead, he says, “Tell me about your research.” Bruce pauses for a moment, looking at Loki. He knows the trickster god is smart, and he knows he could use any information against absolutely anybody at all, but he tells Loki anyway.

“Well, at the moment, I’m researching the psyche of the Hulk, and I’m trying to cooperate more with him and make him more of a team player so that we can be useful. Then I’m also researching the languages of India, and trying to re-create the super soldier serum for SHIELD.”

“Tell me about the Hulk,” Loki requests. And Bruce goes off on his own tale, telling Loki about how his mother and he used to be abused by his father and how he would bottle up his own rage at him because he was too tiny to do anything. And then after his father killed his mother, he started turning into a huge green monster and eventually killed his father. It’s quite a leap for Bruce, to tell the story of his life and dig up all the painful things, but there’s something about Loki’s eyes, earnestly drinking in his every word that urges him on to continue.

So Bruce tells him about how he used to cut himself when he wanted to contain the Hulk, and about his suicide attempt and his subsequent unorthodox recovery. Bruce falters at times, his own voice stopping without his conscious volition, but he looks at Loki and somehow, rebuilding some part of him yet tearing himself down, manages to continue. 

“I am as unorthodox as you are,” Loki finally says. He’s rubbing his arms with the palms of his hands and then the tips of his fingers, pressing deep into the flesh, and he’s just distractedly looking out of the window in contemplation.

“Don’t do that,” Bruce says quietly, and reaches over to pull Loki’s hands away from his still-healing wounds. The bandages now have pinpricks of red, and Loki looks down in surprise.

“Oh,” he says, his tone slightly disbelieving. He turns his gaze on Bruce, out the window, then back down at his hands on the blanket covering his legs. When was I doing that to myself? Loki wonders, and he wonders if maybe Bruce is a kindred spirit too. 

“Anyway, I brought you a book,” Bruce says, and reaches into the paper bag he’d set down next to his chair and draws out a slim volume. It’s Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection by Walt Whitman, and Loki reaches out his slim, spindly hands for it eagerly, and Bruce is a little embarrassed for himself? for Loki? as he realises that this is probably the best response anyone has coaxed out of Loki since he came. Bruce shakes his head and reminds himself that sitting before him is a real human being, no matter how surreal it seems, and that this human is to be treated exactly the same as all the rest and that it’s not a competition to see who can try to heal him faster.

“Thank you,” Loki says slowly, and Bruce can already see that Loki’s eyes are hungry once more, devouring the book and the beautiful, printed soul-scribblings within. 

“You’re welcome,” Bruce replies, but it goes unheard as Loki is already deeply immersed in the poetry and the song of the words. 

Bruce picks up the paper bag and quietly lets himself out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4\. 

It’s four in the motherfucking morning when Loki wakes up. 

Well, thrashes about and then falls out of bed would be more accurate. Loki is shuddering in his tangle of blankets, his limbs trapped and his heart racing. Calm down and un-entangle thyself, he says to himself soothingly, and sets about slowly removing the cocoon cage of covers he has around his own body.

Loki tries to go back to sleep, but it’s to no avail. Covers on, covers off, on his front back side or upside down – no matter what, when he closes his eyes, he can’t help but jerk them open again because he can’t stop seeing monstrosities behind his eyelids. 

He’s ridiculously tired, but he drags his weary self over to the kitchen. Perhaps he could concoct something warm enough to lull himself back into a restless sleep.

Tony is there already, blearily rubbing his eyes, fiddling about with a tablet and inhaling the largest cup of coffee Loki has ever seen. Actually, the cup resembles those that Thor and his friends used when quaffing mead in the great dining hall back in Asgard. Loki blinks.

“Hey,” Tony says. Loki just nods back, and heads for the rows of huge steel contraptions along the wall. He has absolutely no idea how things are categorized inside, so he just opens the first one and proceeds to stare down the very impressive racks of meat. 

“Looking for something?” Tony asks, offhandedly enough to suggest that he’s just being friendly and hasn’t been watching Loki like a hawk just in case he decided to blow up the place.

“Something warm,” Loki says distractedly as he opens the next one to find an array of fish staring glassily back at him.

“Try the cupboards over the sink,” Tony offers. “There’s all sorts of shit in there. And there’s milk in the first fridge next to the dishwasher.” Loki locates the milk (along with a bottle of pure honey) in the first fridge and selects a saucepan from the collection that looks like a saucepan sale in a departmental store in the corner. He pours the milk in and stirs a liberal dose of honey in, then dithers over the mugs in the straining rack next to the sink.

“Just pick any one,” Tony yawns ungracefully as he gestures vaguely. Loki picks the plainest one that he can find, somewhat surprised to see that the mugs there have a variety of superheroes, comic and cartoon characters, and cutesy animals on them. Loki transfers half the steaming mixture into a plain grey mug and puts the rest in an Iron Man mug for Tony.

“Thanks,” Tony murmurs as he curls his oil stained fingers around the handle and brings it to his mouth, his eyes closed. He downs half the mug in two swallows, while Loki is still exhaling gently over the top of the liquid and sipping gently.

“That’s good,” he mutters drowsily, and Loki extends his hand sharply to keep Tony’s head from falling right into the mug. His hand on Tony’s shoulder is thin and bony, but it’s imbued with the strength that’s coming back to Loki day by day.

“Nngh,” Tony grunts and he pulls himself upright with a visible effort. 

“This is what happens when you’re too tired to solder things together but you’re too caffeinated to sleep,” he complains, and a flicker of an amused smile darts across Loki’s face. 

“You should sleep,” he remarks as Tony leans his face on his palm and proceeds to dip his nose in the warm milk.

“I should,” he agrees, and then polishes off the milk and waves goodnight to Loki, trudging off to bed.

For the first time in eons, Loki feels like he’s slowly approaching normal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5\. 

Thor sits on Loki’s bed, his back against the headboard and his massive feet nearing the end of the double bed, and waits for his brother to finish. Loki is next to him, leaning both against his warm, fiery side and against the headboard, his back propped up by a pillow, Leaves of Grass in his hands. There’s just the quiet flipping of pages and the muted buzz of the television in the wall that Thor is watching. He’s idly watching a wrestling match, but really, he’s watching Loki.

Loki is beautiful, he thinks. All slender and slim but without the soft curves of a woman. He has the hard lines of muscle, the lean physique that Thor wishes to run his massive hands over. Loki’s ebony black hair is slowly regaining its lost shine and lustre, and Thor raises one hand to pet his brother’s head. Loki doesn’t look up, but he leans just a fraction more into Thor’s warmth. The book in Loki’s hands reminds Thor of how intelligent and clever his brother is, and nothing can detract from his intelligence and how quickly he picks up things. Thor marvels at Loki’s mind, because Thor was the one who was frustrating his tutors while Loki was the one outpacing them and choosing to learn from Asgard’s libraries instead.

Then Thor catches sight of a scar peeking out from the edge of Loki’s sleeve, and wham. He’s reminded painfully of how broken his brother, his lover? is, and he can’t help but feel a painful twinge at his heart. Does Loki even love me anymore? He thinks in his head, and only Loki’s sudden inhale alerts him to the fact that he’s accidentally thought it out loud.

So Thor holds his breath, because he doesn’t know what to do. Does he apologize? Should he be sorry about it? And the million dollar question – what if Loki doesn’t still love him?

Then Loki replies, “I cannot love you in the way that you want,” and Thor’s heart shatters into a million tiny pieces.

Thor stiffens painfully. This is his worst nightmare come true, this is the apocalypse, and this is the world cracking and crashing down upon him. Somewhere, deep down, even though he tried to deny it numerous times, he loves Loki. He loves Loki he has loved no other before, and it simultaneously torments him yet brings him joy.

“I cannot give you carnal pleasure,” Loki says softly, pulling away from Thor. Wait, what? Is this what he meant?

“No!” He exclaims, and his voice rings loud and true in the enclosed space. He reaches out to Loki, only to have Loki shrink away from him, moving to the edge of the bed. It’s yet another stab into his already wounded heart, but it doesn’t slow the deluge of his suppressed thoughts.

“I do not expect that from you,” he attempts to explain, clumsily, his arms making meaningless gestures that still convey his helplessness. “I only want to love you, Loki. I want to have your company in sleep at night, I want to be able to hold your hand as lovers do when we are in the company of others, I wish to be able to kiss your lips. But if the only route to pleasures of the flesh are through my own hand, it is perfectly alright. Loki, I will not mind. I just wish to keep you by my side.” 

The words tumble painfully and truthfully from Thor’s lips, and it’s as if the words came out freshly baked from the bakery of his soul. It’s fresh, warm and his arduously spoken words resound true in the air. 

Loki scoots closer to Thor, snuggling up close to his side, and brings his lips to Thor’s.

It’s a fleeting kiss. It’s just a gentle press of thin, pale lips to broad ones, but Thor feels like his heart can beat again.

“Loki,” he breathes when they pull apart, and Loki just takes hold of his arm and lays his own head upon it.

“That is as far as I can go,” Loki confesses, his voice wavering. “The Chitauri were not kind masters. They took me without my consent and treated me like spoils of war.” Here he stops, because he cannot continue without his voice failing him, without his own emotions rising like a tsunami and drowning out any and all coherent thought processes. Thor squishes Loki to him, his thick arms clutching Loki in a vice-like grip.

“I will wait,” he promises, his own voice quavering. “I will wait to the end of my lifetime, and if you and I never lie together again, I will still love you. I will love to the end of time. I just wish for you to remain by my side.” God, what had those monsters done to Loki? Had he himself driven Loki to the point of collaborating with the Chitauri? He had so many questions, but yet so few answers…

Then Loki squeaks in a rusty exhale of breath, and Thor realises that he’s squeezing Loki tightly enough to hurt. He releases Loki quickly, running his palms over Loki’s arms in a panic.

“I’m sorry, I did not realise that I was hurting you! Did I injure you?” Loki reaches up with his mouth again and silences Thor, and puts his book aside to lie down, turn out the light, and he fits himself to Thor for the night and for forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See y'all soon! :)


	12. Chapter Nine, part four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scene 6! Here is more Loki whump but mixed in with some Pepper. Pepper is awesome.
> 
> Thank you all for reading this. Seeing how many views and kudos my baby gets really makes my day!
> 
> There should be two more parts after this unless I keep changing my mind :x 
> 
> Additional trigger warning: brief allusion to rape. The Chitauri are fucking evil.

6.

“You have failed,” the Other hisses. His voice and his words are sibilant, sinister-sounding in the ominous silence of the too-large chamber. 

Loki is kneeling, something sharp on the ground digging painfully into his bony right knee. His hands are tied at the wrist behind his back, and he cannot lift his head for the heavy pounding within. His clothes are tattered, his armour ripped off him, and he is covered in bruises and lacerations. 

“You will be punished,” the Other decrees, getting up from his chair and moving over to Loki. He nudges at Loki with the tip of Loki’s own sceptre, and Loki collapses helplessly because he can’t hold himself up any longer. It’s ironic, his own damn tool being used to hurt him, but he can’t stop it. His legs and his arms are numb and he can’t feel them, and his sternum is on fire from where it was just nudged. The cloth over his legs rip as he falls to reveal his scarred flesh, and Loki flinches when the Other prods his thighs.

“What’s this?” He taunts, and uses the tip of the sceptre to etch a long, bloody line of ice so cold that it burns into his leg. It’s parallel to the latest row of scabs, and Loki vaguely thinks that this is a line of deliberation, just not inflicted by himself. Loki bites his lip bloody as the gash throbs and stings, and the monster towering above him continues to torment him.

“It seems to be that you like pain,” he says, conjuring a whip and slashing it down viciously on Loki’s back. Loki doesn’t scream now. He moans, quietly, and wishes for unconsciousness.

Later he screams, and he wishes for death as the Other takes off his own pants, then tears the sorry remains of his clothes off.

-+-

Loki’s scream wakes Thor, and he finds that his brother is thrashing wildly in his arms. He gets smacked on the nose and nearly poked in the eye, but he pins Loki down and voices his desperation, right in Loki’s face.

“Loki, wake up!” 

Loki opens his eyes, looks Thor in the eye and lets loose an even louder scream of pure verbalized panic, twisting out of his grasp and tumbling painfully to the ground. Thor stares at his brother, who is panting and gasping in the cool air, curled up on the hard wooden floor.

“Loki?” he questions, and the man on the floor looks up with his eyes drowning. “The Chitauri turn my dreams unpleasant,” he tells Thor, trying for nonchalance even though his voice is unsure and still terror-filled, and they both instinctively move towards each other, meeting on the edge of the bed, seeking the safety of the other’s arms.

“Don’t pin me down,” Loki breathes, and Thor nods his assent, nodding blindly into Loki’s thin shoulder because he’ll say yes to everything his brother says. 

It’s only six in the morning, but it’s already a bad day.

-+-

“Go,” Loki tells Thor later in the morning, after they’ve had an early breakfast together in the kitchen. Thor looks at him, uncertainty clear in the way that he dithers around Loki and keeps glancing at the doorway and then back at Loki.

“I will be alright,” Loki huffs. “Do not cease going about your business on my account.”

“You will come to me if there are any problems, yes?” Thor says, his big eyes searching Loki’s for a promise.

“Yes, I will.” Loki makes little shooing actions, and Thor finally leaves the room. Loki puts their plates in the sink, cleans them with hands that tire more and more with every passing second, and trudges wearily back to his room. He sinks onto the bed, and stares listlessly out the window.

He watches the man in a pinstriped suit across the road enter the deli and come back out with a steaming cup. There’s a hobo on the street begging for change, and a little girl in a blue coat asks her mother for some coins to give him. His smile lights up her face in return, and their faces outstrip Loki’s in levels of happiness any day. It’s sad, but he quashes it down. He should be glad that out there, somewhere, there are people who are still happier, more kind than he is. Then there’s a Ferrari, ironically, crawling down the street with the rest of the cars. So much for being a fast car, Loki thinks, in an effort to distract himself.

There are insidious miniature Chitauri crawling all over his brain and baying for his blood. The Other is back, and he’s leading the charge against his defenceless self, and he wonders why prisoners and spoils of war are always sexually assaulted and beaten. Loki feels filthy, he feels guilty for all the evil he’s done, and he wishes he’d never thought to use his own magic for evil, he wishes he was brought up somewhere that his magic wasn’t considered evil, he wishes that he’d never been born. 

He wants to claw out the evil that he knows is rushing through his veins.

But Loki just keeps his eyes wide open and sits on his hands. I cannot, he tells himself fiercely. I am not evil. My actions were evil, but my actions can be changed and I can do good. There is nothing wrong with me. He repeats this mantra over and over and over again, drilling it into his skull, keeping his hands beneath his ass because he knows that if he doesn’t, he’s going to find something to hurt himself with.

It’s not really for him, it’s for the tears that he knows Thor is not ashamed to drip, it’s for Steve’s sad puppy eyes, it’s for Tony’s treating him normally, it’s for Natasha and Phil and Bruce and Pepper and… 

There’s a knock at his door.

“Enter,” he croaks, and clears his throat and scrubs at his eyes.

“Hello,” Pepper says gently, and sets out two cups on the bedside table and pours hot tea into them.

“Thor said you had a rough night,” she said.

“I don’t need pity,” Loki says stiffly. God, what was up with them? Why was it so hard for them to understand that he just wanted to be left alone if all they could give was useless pity? It just made him feel even worse. And given that he was already feeling like he was fucking teetering on the edge of a cliff, he would rather have no company at all.

“You know, I once hated myself that much too,” Pepper says conversationally, and Loki’s head jerks up in surprise.

“It was stupid. I was foolish. Tony and I broke up, and we were both so unhappy. He went out and got drunk and had a lot of sex with a lot of skinny girls. I was unhappy, and I thought if I were skinnier like those girls he was having one night stands with, he would want to be back with me. So for six months, he didn’t talk to me, and for six months, I either didn’t eat or I just purged everything I ate. I hated myself enough to deny myself of essential nutrients until I nearly died.”

Loki’s eyes are huge and round and fixated on Pepper’s own eyes, and he’s hanging on to her every word because it’s actually a pretty good distraction. Talking to someone, that is. Having someone talk to him. Whatever.

“I’m saying that even I, even though I’m so far removed from all the action and all the war that you guys go through, I’ve hated myself too. Our whole team has. Some of us get nightmares, some of us hurt ourselves like you did, some of us seek or sought comfort in familiar routines or in alcohol or something else. You’re not alone, Loki, and you need to know that.” 

She tugs Loki’s hands out from beneath him, and rubs the circulation back into them. His hands are red from the pressure and numb, and he lets out an involuntary ‘eep’ because he didn’t expect her to notice that he was sitting on his hands, much less cutting off the blood supply.

“Don’t do that to your hands,” she says, rubbing his hands between hers to restore the blood flow, and he thinks foggily that her hands feel good on his soul. 

“I don’t trust myself today,” he says simply, and looks back down at his hands between hers. Her hands still and leave his frame of vision, and for a heart stopping moment he thinks that she’s leaving him. I knew it, he thinks. I disgust her. I’m an inhumane and disgusting creature, and everyone leaves – then there’s the soft touch of her palm against his cheek, and she’s tenderly holding his heart in her hand.

“Alright,” she says without fanfare. “I’ve got to go into the office soon. Why don’t you take whatever you plan to do today and come and sit with me today? It’s a little lonely being all alone in that silly big office Tony gave me.” 

Loki nods dumbly and gets out of bed, careful not to trip over anything. He wasn’t expecting this gesture of kindness, and he’s more than a little surprised not to detect any pity in her words. His legs feel a little wobbly and weak as he goes around putting a few books and writing materials in a canvas bag, and Pepper, bless her, tucks a steadying arm into the crook of his elbow as they step out of his room and head outside.

“You can come and find me anytime if you need it,” she says, and he thanks her quietly.

-+-

At the end of the day, he snuggles up to Thor’s side as they’re about to go to sleep.

“How was your day, Loki?” Thor enquires, pulling Loki closer with an arm around his shoulders.

“Pepper understands,” Loki says plainly, and reaches up to kiss Thor.

Maybe, Loki thinks, today wasn’t too bad after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See you all soon! :)


	13. Chapter Nine, part five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features Odin and Frigga, and the worst case scenario ever to happen to an LGBTQ person should they come out to their family. But it turns into the best case scenario later on with Frigga!

7.

There was something wrong with this, Natasha thought. It gave her the chills. And honestly, nothing much creeped her out.

The Avengers were looking into the great hall of Asgard via a video link, all of them standing in front of the huge screen and camera Tony had set up. They were watching Loki and Thor in their meeting with Odin and Frigga, and the air around was icy. Four months had elapsed after Loki’s attempt and his subsequent move to Avengers Tower, and Loki looked a helluva lot better now, standing next to Thor. 

But what all of them didn’t like was how Odin didn’t acknowledge Loki.

It was as if he didn’t exist. He greeted Thor, beckoned him to stand before him, but it was as if Loki was invisible. Or just not even worthy of his gaze. Natasha was beginning to fear the worst.

“How is Loki?” Odin asked Thor. Thor frowned, because what the fuck was going on? Wasn’t Loki right next to him? Odin could have just asked Loki… But he answered anyway.

“As you can see, Father,” he deliberately said, gesturing to Loki in an attempt to get Odin to stop overlooking Loki’s presence. “Loki is slowly attaining a healthy weight. He also does not engage in the self-injurious behaviour that Bruce Banner reported that he had. Loki is recovering well, Father.”

“Purported,” Odin rumbles, discontent evident. “It is purported that Loki was ill. This illness that you speak of, it is not befitting of a warrior of Asgard. It is a sign of weakness. But Loki was never a warrior of Asgard to begin with.”

Steve and Tony held on to Bruce’s arms tightly, feeling his muscles flex as he clenched his fists angrily. It was a struggle to repress the incensed surge of thoughts, because he was pretty sure that he’d explained to Odin that Loki’s depression was not a sign of weakness and also not due to any fault of his own – it was actually instead due to Odin’s and Asgard’s own perceptions of Loki that had driven him to the brink of the cliff.

“Not now,” Pepper whispers into Natasha’s ear, and she nods sharply. She has grown to be protective over the trickster god, and she can feel the tendrils of ire creeping through her already. 

Clint and Phil stand with their arms crossed, Clint’s right elbow just touching Phil’s left. Clint feels funny. He feels conflicted. He knows what it’s like to lose your parents – given that Odin and Frigga haven’t even looked at Loki, he’s pretty sure that’s whatever the fuck is happening now. Loki nearly killed Phil, he reminds himself. And he still gets the occasional nightmare about his loss of control. But as he looks at the almost-painfully-thin man standing beside Thor’s hale and hearty frame, he can’t help but see a fragility that he normally leaps to protect.

It’s fucking up his mind.

Odin and Asgard and fucking life is fucking with Loki’s mind.

Clint doesn’t know what to think. 

But then, Odin speaks again, and it’s the end of the world. It’s the end of everything as they know it, and Tony privately thinks that this might be worse than losing Jarvis. If he was Loki, that is. Because Odin’s words are the most cruel words that anyone here has ever heard. From a parent, from a ruler, from a supposedly wise person to a son, a citizen, a person desperately wishing for acceptance.

“It has come to my attention that Loki has had numerous sexual alliances with men,” Odin pronounces carefully, and Loki shifts awkwardly next to Thor. He never meant for Odin to find about that. He knows that it would greatly discomfort both Odin and Frigga, and for all the largely absent and blind parents that they are, Loki still retains some miserable shred of filial piety. Also because he doesn’t want to give them yet another reason for them to hate him.

“In light of my evaluation of Loki’s behaviour and his character, I hereby disown Loki. I hereby free you of the name Odinson; you are free to select whichever name you may prefer.”

Thor is gaping in shock. So are the Avengers. Their eyes are wide open, their mouths are dangling and catching flies. No one believes what Odin has just said. It’s like a goddamn death knell sounding, and no one wants to think about the unspeakable horror of what Odin just did.

“I have never been an Odinson,” Loki says, drawing himself up to his full height and staring Odin down in the eye, even though every passing second is like a bayonet skewering through him. “I have always been, and you and everyone else knows it now – I have always been a Laufeyson.” The passage of time is long, slow and arduous, and Loki just wishes that he could just crawl into some dark, murky hole somewhere and just die. Die of the humiliation, shame and embarrassment that he knows is flooding his face. He doesn’t need to look at the Avengers to know that their faces are all full of pity, and he hates it. He fucking hates being pitied. 

“No!” Thor bellows. 

His roar of wrath is stunning, and it makes the air around them quiver. The Avengers and Loki nearly rear back from the shocking volume of his sudden shout, but they recover and stand their ground. There are now nine pairs of eyes glaring, blazing with fiery fury at Odin, and they can see the moment that Odin does a double take as he realises that he’s just angered his own crown prince, and his band of seven other superheroes on Midgard and they all look murderous enough to slay him. Multiple times.

“You cannot disown Loki, Father,” Thor disagrees. His strong voice is the best thing Loki has heard in centuries, because it’s finally on his side. He hasn’t heard much along the lines of voices on his side, rooting for him throughout his lifetime, and it’s making his heart beat out of rhythm. This is a new thing to him, and it’s utterly pleasant. Completely, wholly good. Loki can’t say that he’s had much of that in his life.

“I disown him on three grounds – firstly, he has had filthy relations with other men and brought great dishonour to his family and to our name. Secondly, he has weaknesses of the mind which disqualify him from being a warrior of Asgard. Thirdly, he is not of Asgardian descent and neither is he of Odinson blood. I have let him go on for too long here; I must set this to rights.”

“Depression isn’t a weakness of the mind,” Bruce retorts hotly, his face flushed with his outrage. “I have explained that it was your treatment and Asgard’s perception of his talents which led him to have practically zero self-esteem and to loathe himself!” 

“You are a wise healer on Midgard, Bruce Banner,” Odin says, skirting the question. “I would ask that you not impose your opinions upon the traditions of Asgard.” Bruce splutters, and Steve opens his mouth in preparation to say something, but Thor beats him to it.

“I have had knowledge of Loki, Father.” 

That one sentence changes Odin’s face. Up ‘til now, Odin had his usual inscrutable expression. But now his countenance twists and morphs into something so ugly that everyone shies away from it. It looks like the face of pure evil, something so malignant and so horrifying that no one can stand to look at it.

“Do not attempt to make me rescind my renouncement of Loki,” Odin spits, his face warped and distorted with pure ugliness. It’s fearful, Tony thinks. No matter how bad a father Howard was, he never measured up to Odin. Howard was a homophobe, but he never held that purely diabolic look upon his face. Never had he gazed upon Tony with only odious viciousness that bespoke of a perception of his own son to be depraved beyond salvation.

“I love Loki like I have loved no other,” Thor says, his voice ringing with the conviction of his thousands of years of age. “Loki was raised as my brother, but as you yourself have said, he is not of the same lineage. I hold affection and endearment for Loki, and I merely wish for him to be by my side, always.” 

Odin’s face has turned an impressive shade of puce. There are veins bulging in his eyes, and his mouth is twisted into a repugnant snarl.

“Leave,” he barks. “You are not exiled or disowned on account of your status as the crown prince of Asgard. But on the occasions that you return, you will avoid meeting me. I do not wish to set eyes upon you.”

“As you wish, Father,” Thor says, and his voice is sorrowful. “I am crestfallen, Father. I am disappointed that you have not even attempted to allow paternal love to factor into your decisions. We are still your sons, still of your upbringing regardless of whether or not you deny us publicly, yet you have chosen to forsake and dispute that today. But I do not regret my actions – I shall proceed to my chambers to pack my belongings and then return with Loki to Midgard, where we are accepted for the human beings that we are.”

That is the most eloquent speech that anyone has heard Thor make, and Loki privately changes his own opinion of his brother. His brother is willing to give up his title, his position, his everything, everything that he has known for him. His brother is no longer the clumsy oaf who is only good for charging into battle. Thor is now his protector who holds such an ardent candle for him in his heart that he cannot help but feel absolutely, unreservedly loved. It’s a new feeling, but it’s entirely welcome. 

Beloved. For once, Loki feels like he can apply this word to himself.

“Boys,” Frigga’s voice calls for the first time in the entire conversation. Everyone’s head turns to look at her. They see that her eyes are brimming with unshed tears. 

“Loki, would you come with me to my chambers?” Loki looks at her, and in that one still moment, he sees the regret stretching for the length of his life in her eyes, and his heart cannot allow him to disagree. He trails after her, a little like a puppy following doggedly behind its mother, for fear of losing his way. Frankly, it wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Will you sit at my knee, like you used to do?” She asks, and she sounds like she might break if Loki says no. And for all the times that he has felt let down by her, he cannot find it within him to refuse.

He moves to sit cross-legged like a little boy at her knee, and he forces himself not to look at her face. If he looks at her face, at her eyes, he is somehow sure that he will begin crying, and that would be the end of all as he knows it. So he doesn’t. He looks at the pale blue fabric of her dress covering her knee and wills away the tears.

“I have failed you, and I am very, very sorry for that. I didn’t notice when you were hurting, I didn’t notice you when you needed me to protect you, and I didn’t do what I should have as a mother. But now I see how I have done wrong by you, and – and – your father may have disowned you, but I will always think of you as my son, if you will allow me to do so.” Loki can’t help it. He puts his head down on his mother’s knee, just like he used to do when he was a small child and before his pride swallowed all his desire to seek comfort from his mother, and Frigga pets his head. She puts her slender, firm hand on his hair and she strokes his head, and they’re transported centuries by that very moment. 

“Mother,” he rasps. He shifts and moves to kneel, looking tentatively up at Frigga, and she immediately understands what he wants. What he’s always wanted, what he’s wanted especially after certain catastrophic events but never got. But had too much pride to ask for. She reaches out and envelopes Loki in a hug, and she sees one tear of her own glisten on Loki’s now silky black hair. She feels Loki’s tears soak through the fabric over her stomach as he buries his face in her torso, wraps his own skinny arms around her, and finally lets go.

Thor, of course, has to spoil the moment. 

It’s only been a few minutes after Loki and Frigga both stop crying, but Thor bursts into the room.

“Brother!” He calls out loud, brandishing armfuls of bags. Then he stops short, flustered, as he sees Loki and Frigga. He drops the bags, and flaps his hands in a mild panic.

“I apologise, I should have knocked, I’ll come back later -” Frigga looks down at Loki, and she cups his tear-stained face. Their faces mirror each other as Loki’s lips curve up slightly in the first smile he’s given his mother in such a long time that it would be taxing for him to remember when. 

“Come in,” she says gently, and lets go of Loki. Loki unfolds and stands up, growing before his mother’s eyes. There are too many things that she missed, watching Loki right in front of her makes her feel proud. 

“That was undignified,” Loki remarks, and scrubs a haughty hand over his eyes. Thor approaches, slowly, then doesn’t bother to contain himself any longer. He rushes forward, and clings on to Loki like a koala bear, inhaling the scent of Loki’s neck.

“I am so very proud of both of you,” Frigga says, and Thor detaches himself from Loki with an effort. He pulls Frigga in to a three-way embrace, squeezing them both with his heavily muscled arms.

“Careful with Mother, Thor,” Loki reminds, pushing at Thor’s huge arm. Frigga laughs, and she brings both her arms up to hug her sons. 

“I won’t break,” she promises, and she squeezes right back. 

Although they don’t know it, each of them carefully record and keep this precious moment in a special corner of their memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only two more scenes and one more part after this. I swear I'm getting a little nostalgic. Don't really want this to end...


	14. Chapter Nine, the last and final part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 8 was just a leeetle bit hard to write. Not that I've been close enough to that point before, but I had a similar moment once when I went on a bit of a frenzy (by my standards, anyway) with a boxcutter and then looked down at the scabs a while later. Nowadays I'm much more controlled, though. 
> 
> This is the last of this piece of work. There's a happy ending!
> 
> Thank you all for reading this, commenting, and giving me kudos. It's been a wonderful journey writing this, and you all have been an instrumental part of all this. I've held on to this final part for a few days, wishing that I didn't have to post it because it meant saying goodbye, and goodbye means going away and forgetting! (Haha. I'm not a fan of Peter Pan.) But I hope that's not the case! Anyway, whump seems like the only thing I can write, and I'm not much of a writer in terms of having a proper plot and developing it nicely. So I might write more h/c one-shots in future.

8\. 

“I just realised that all of us – everyone of us has had problems,” Bruce muses, where he’s working at the bench opposite Loki’s in his lab. Loki looks up, and he snorts. Bruce rolls his eyes at Loki’s raised eyebrow. 

“It’s not the trite problems that the entire population of America claims to have,” Bruce clarifies. “It’s not standard things that trouble us. Us Avengers have serious problems.”

“Between the flesh-melting aliens last week and the electronic insects this week, I’d say we have serious problems,” Loki snarks, looking up to smirk at Bruce, and they both laugh. 

“No, I mean that all of us have more serious issues with ourselves,” Bruce says again, and Loki goes silent. His laugh stops abruptly, and Bruce wonders if he’s pushed things too far. They’ve never talked about this before.

“I know,” Loki says, forcing his tone to be even. “Phil and Pepper had eating disorders. Tony was an alcoholic and was unhealthily dependent on antacids and coffee. Steve hated his pre-serum self. Clint has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Natasha had PTSD over Pepper and everything that she experienced.”

“And there’s you and I,” Bruce adds. “We hated ourselves and we hurt ourselves.” He’s goading Loki, trying to make him admit it. Bruce hopes that Loki would say it – maybe it would galvanise some catharsis, he thinks. Saying it out loud, admitting it to yourself, is the first step. And no matter how painful it is, it helps, Bruce reminds himself. There’s guilt starting to creep through him, but he quells it by firmly thinking that it’d be good, ultimately, for Loki.

There’s a very, very, long pause.

No one moves. Bruce keeps his hands exactly where they are on the microscope and the culture plates. Loki still has his hands poised in mid-air, translucent blue screens rotating in the air around his head.

“And we tried to kill ourselves,” he says in a rush of breath. His hands drop limply to his sides, and he just stands there, staring straight at Bruce. Bruce can almost see the cogs and wheels turning and grinding in his head, and he stares right back at Loki, just waiting for him to continue.

“We tried to take our own lives,” Loki repeats, slowly this time. Then his knees give way and he sits down with a thump on the floor, looking a little surprised. Bruce moves over gradually, careful not to startle Loki. He knows that Loki’s now in a pretty fragile state of mind. He remembers when the gravity of what the hell he actually did really hit him. He remembers squeezing into the narrow space beneath his bed, curling up and crying for hours at a stretch in prison. He remembers the desperation and the hollowness of it all.

He sits down in front of Loki, crosses his legs and reaches out his hand to take Loki’s in his own. Loki mirrors his pose, closes his eyes, and just lets his hand be held.

Loki doesn’t cry. He doesn’t scream, or wail, or have any dramatic outbursts. He just has his eyes shut, blocking out all visual stimulation, while his eyes in his mind are wide open, just thinking and processing. I really tried to die, he tells himself, and although he knew full well what he was trying to do – he still feels it slowly sink in and yet batter his mind with the force of a brick at the same time.

It’s a long time before Loki raises his chin from his chest. He opens his eyes, and he looks right into Bruce’s, and Bruce reads his unspoken gratitude.

“We’re still here,” he reassures, his soft voice like a balm. “We’re still here, alive and breathing.” Loki nods sharply and loosens his grip on Bruce’s hand, looking a little embarrassed to have needed the contact, but Bruce keeps his hold on Loki’s hand.

“I would have killed for this,” he says. Loki looks down at his lap, so Bruce continues. “I didn’t just take one day. I took, like, almost a week. For a week after I realised what the hell I really had done, I was squeezed in the space beneath my bed in my prison cell and I was just crying. All day. It’s not shameful, Loki. I would have killed to have someone just there, with me, because part of the reason as to why I needed one week instead of just a day was because I was so goddamn lonely.” Loki huffs a sigh, and the corners of his mouth quirks up as he looks up at Bruce.

“Thank you,” he says, then he says something so quietly that Bruce nearly doesn’t hear it. “Could we stay like this for a while longer?” Bruce doesn’t reply. He knows that to reply would be to acknowledge that he heard what Loki said, and he knows that Loki didn’t really want him to hear that. It would have been a complete stripping away of Loki’s pride if he were to reply. Instead, he just doesn’t move. He sits right there, and keeps holding Loki’s hand, anchoring him to right here and right now.

“Do you ever regret injuring yourself?” Loki asks, his voice hesitant and just a little unsure of whether Bruce will answer or not. Bruce doesn’t say anything at first, and Loki silently despairs. I’m a fool, he tells himself. I was stupid. I just ruined everything.

“Yes and no,” Bruce finally says. “I’m sorry for the delay in my reply. This is still a difficult topic for me to talk about, but I’m glad we’re finally having this conversation. It’s been years since I last did it, and I know I’ve gotten over it a long time ago, but it’s going to be a difficult thing to talk about. Always, Loki.”

“I used to have one day a year to myself. I promised myself that one day a year, on my birthday, I wouldn’t hurt myself. Birthdays are supposed to be times that a person’s existence is celebrated, and before I got it into my head that I wanted to die, I told myself that I would just not do anything harmful to myself on that one day. So for that one day I treated myself like I was a normal person and I blocked out all the negative thoughts about myself. But all other days were fair game, and it really took me a very long while to get out of the lowest periods of my life.”

“I do that too,” Loki offers in return. “I thought I was being a sentimental fool, but I did it anyway. All Asgardians have a day that’s specially commemorative for them. For Thor, it’s the first Thursday of the fourth month of the year, April. Literally, Thor’s Day. I didn’t have one because I wasn’t of Asgardian birth, but – but I loved Thor. I told myself that I wouldn’t do anything on Thor’s Day, because it would hurt him if he ever knew. Now, do tell me that I’m overemotional.”

“You’re not,” Bruce says, a tad of defiance creeping in. He moves his thumb to stroke the back of Loki’s hand, and he continues.

“Sometimes I look down at myself, and I wonder why all this happened. Why I had to have a father whose actions created all the rage, why the rage eventually turned into the Hulk after I was doused with gamma rays, why I even began hating myself for it and hurting myself. Sometimes I wonder why it happened to me and not to someone else. I used to look down at my scars and think that I was ugly. That I was scarred, flawed, and disfigured for life. That continued until I got into a relationship with Tony and Steve. They really changed how I looked at myself. I don’t see myself as an ugly creature now. I look at the same scars, and I see myself as a survivor. And that’s what you are too, Loki. We’re survivors.” 

Loki shudders, but he doesn’t cry. He squeezes Bruce’s hand tightly, as he forces his words out from the depths of him.

“I thought it was too much to ask of anyone,” he says, with an effort. “I thought that after involving everyone in my affairs, it was too much to ask anyone to just tell me that I wasn’t some maimed, defaced monster because of what I did to myself.”

“They kissed my scars,” Bruce shares, his incredulity creeping into his voice. “Steve and Tony. There was a very exhausting battle. I was still the Hulk, then I changed back while walking back to HQ and they all saw because I was, well, naked. Then I told them all what happened, and that night, Steve and Tony and I just were in bed and they kissed my scars. I was horrified. I was utterly, one hundred percent horrified, even nauseated, but they assured me that they knew what they were doing. They told me that they loved all the different bits of me. Even the parts that I thought were sickening and made me a monster. They said I definitely wasn’t a monster. They said that the scars made me a survivor, and it was all I needed to know.” His tone is light-hearted, but it carries all the weight of his own previous hate and his fears, and Loki feels his heart throb in sync.

“I see,” Loki says. “Thank you.” He uncrosses his legs, slowly, and stands up, extending a hand to Bruce. They both stand up, and Loki now expects it to be awkward. After all, he was never good about the entire emotions thing.

But Bruce just pulls him into a loose hug, and Loki somehow finds his own arms rising up to circle Bruce’s shoulders of their own accord.

“We made it,” Bruce says, his voice low and comforting in Loki’s ear, and then he says, “It’s okay to cry.” That’s it. That does it for both of them, and it’s as if a floodgate opened. There are tears just streaming down both their cheeks, dripping on each other’s shoulders. It’s not just Loki, it’s not just Bruce. It’s both of them, weeping with the sheer relief of being alive, with the feelings slamming like a Mack truck into them. 

It’s because they nearly died. It’s because they didn’t die. It’s because they’re still here, today, right now, and everything is fine. They have people around them who care for them, they have people who love them, they have everything that they could ever ask or wish for, and it’s all alright now. 

It’s all alright now.

When Bruce stops sniffing, and Loki’s breaths are regular once more, they both disentangle from each other. Loki keeps his head down, pinching his nose with his long fingers.

“That was undignified,” Loki says. His face is heating up with the warmth of his embarrassment. 

“That was cathartic and healing,” Bruce counters. “How about we head for a cup of warm something in the kitchen? I don’t really feel like getting back to work,” he proposes.

“I can make hot chocolate,” Loki says, and he and Bruce both proceed to the kitchen, slowly, picking up their emotions from where they’re all scattered around on the floor. 

It’s all alright now.

 

 

 

 

 

9\. 

It’s been a while since Loki’s been in action. 

He misses it, actually. He misses practicing with throwing knives, daggers, using his magic to erect weapons and shields and fight out of literal thin air. He misses the sing of magic in his veins as he twists and turns and pivots in mid air and takes down targets.

So one day, he goes down to the shooting range and looks for Phil, because if anyone could authorize him to use weapons without the team protesting, it would be Phil. Tony could have armed him, but he wanted something that wasn’t a ray gun or a blaster. So he pulls out his Asgardian armour, dusts it off, and walks down in his full glory. 

Clint does a double take when he sees him come in. He visibly goggles, his eyes going wide and his mouth dropping open, even though his arms are still holding his bow at the exact same position. Natasha turns her head to quirk one eyebrow at him, then holsters her gun.

“Hello, Loki,” greets Phil, unflappable as ever. Gotta love that man, Loki thinks sardonically. He sees someone who’s supposed to be a prisoner, who came to the Avengers Tower near death and almost comatose from a failed suicide, doesn’t even blink when he walks into the shooting range nine months later in full armour.

“Hello, Phil,” Loki returns. “I’d like to borrow some weapons and a lane of the shooting range, if you wouldn’t mind.” 

Phil turns his head to mildly rebuke Clint. “Pay attention to your shooting, Clint.” Clint doesn’t turn back around, but instead fires off an arrow that hits the dead centre of the target. Phil rolls his eyes, but turns back to face Loki with serious intent in his eyes.

“I have to go through some procedures first,” Phil says. “I apologise in advance. They will be rather invasive and personal, but they are necessary to ensure your well-being.” Loki nods stiffly. He’s not anticipating the probing questions to follow, but he knows that there is no other way. And that this is Phil’s way of caring and of looking out for him, so he squares his shoulders and steels himself for what’s to come.

“When was the last time you self-injured? This does not limit your answer incidents where sharp implements were occurred.” Loki takes a deep breath and steadies himself, then opens his mouth to answer.

“Three weeks after I came to Avengers Tower,” Loki answers, and hopes that Phil does not ask for details. He should know them already, anyway – Phil knows everything that goes on, and he’s pretty sure that the klaxon that sounded throughout Avengers Tower when he began clawing at his shins would have told them all that they needed to know. The klaxon hasn’t sounded since, and Phil knows that Loki’s telling the truth.

“Have you had any more impulses or urges to injure yourself?” The language that Phil employs is sharp, clinical and impersonal, and Loki knows that this isn’t Phil trying to intimidate him, it’s just him trying to help Loki distance himself from the painful things that he needs him to say.

“Yes,” Loki says, honestly. He could lie. He could weave a pretty web of words, kill off all his feelings, hide everything from his eyes, keep Phil ever from finding out. He could stick to the safer path of all the supposedly correct answers.

But he doesn’t.

“Almost every day,” he admits. He forces his heart to keep beating. Phil is fair, he reassures himself. Phil will give you a fair trial and evaluate everything you say carefully without any bias.

“But you haven’t acted on them,” Phil carefully notes. Loki gives a quick nod, his heart in his throat and blocking all the words and the defences that he wants to spin for himself. He keeps his eyes on Phil’s.

“If I arm you with weapons, will you use them against yourself?”

“No,” Loki exhales quickly. “No.” He hopes Phil will believe him. He knows that Phil and Clint are together, and Clint still doesn’t think highly of him. Well, it’s to be expected, after Loki controlled his mind and made him essentially his soldier slave. But he hopes that Phil will hear the truth in the words.

“Do you still wish to end your life?”

This question hits Loki like a blow. He doesn’t know how to answer this. How can he? Sometimes he does. Sometimes there’s just everything, from as far back as he can remember, all just flooding him and overwhelming him with the force of a hurricane. And those times are when he wants to die or hurt himself so badly because he’s convinced he can’t live with the guilt. But that’s also when he goes to Bruce or Pepper and just spends the day with them, not getting in their way. He just needs their presence and to be accountable to someone. Or he goes out alone, feeds pigeons and plays with little children in parks, or asks Thor to take him on walks. He distracts himself until the feelings ebb and fade away, and he feels like he can continue on with the day without the desperation and the longing for death taking root and controlling him.

“Sometimes,” Loki confesses. “Sometimes.”

“Do you intend to, in the near future?” Phil asks, his eyes boring into Loki’s. And Loki can’t pull away. He can’t say anything but the truth. 

“No,” Loki says. He’s relieved. This is a question that he can answer. Phil didn’t freak out at Loki’s confession that he still did wish to die, sometimes. “I don’t intend to. Ever.”

Phil’s head inclines in a nod, and Loki feels as though the doubt he had in himself was a huge boulder that just got lifted off his chest. 

“There is a rack of weapons over there,” Phil says, and gestures to the very impressive collection that takes up the entire length of the wall.

“You could use my spare bow,” Clint offers, and Loki’s head jerks to him in surprise. He’s not sure if the archer is serious about it, but he certainly looks it. But Loki thinks he can see the shadow of some doubt lingering around Clint’s eyes, and he’s starting to think of a polite way to refuse when Natasha speaks.

“Hey, Loki,” she calls, and proceeds to flip six knives at him. He reacts fast, catching all of them between his fingers, heart thudding. It’s just the surprise and the adrenaline, he tells himself. It’s definitely not because she just displayed quite the show of trust.

“That could have been dangerous,” Clint scolds Natasha, his brows furrowed. 

“They were sheathed, dummy,” she says, playfully flicking his forehead. He grumbles, but laughs and turns to Loki. 

“You can have the lane between Tasha and I,” he says, and this time, Loki nods. He nods at Phil first, who is standing right there with his arms crossed, and is that approval and pride that Loki sees radiating from his eyes? Anyway, he nods at Phil in gratitude, and moves over to the indicated lane and begins to train, letting the newfound trust and the approval from all three of them wash over him in a pleasant rush of feelings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

10\. 

Once again, there are strange happenings in Avengers Tower.

This time, it concerns Loki.

Loki’s been disappearing every day, without telling the Avengers where he’s been. Or rather, he can’t be readily found in the tower, and when he comes home, it’s not with the smell of the perspiration of little children. It’s with a different smell. It’s with some vague, faint animal smell, and none of them can figure out why.

Of course, it’s all solved one day when Loki calls ahead to get Phil and Steve to gather them all in the living room. They’re all seated, when Loki comes in, laden with a pushcart. The pushcart contains a huge, humongous kind of plastic pink structure with boxed divisions of different sizes. It looks like some sort of office organiser with holes punched into the sides, and the drawers taped shut.

“Clint,” he says, carefully un-taping a section of the huge pink thing. He slowly pulls out the plastic drawer bit by bit, and walks over to Clint. Clint stands up to take the drawer, and nearly drops it in shock.

There’s a tiny bulldog puppy, curled up on a ragged blanket and snoozing away inside. 

“You…” Clint sputters, but Loki just grins and turns back to another drawer.

“For Natasha, a rabbit.” Natasha peers inside her drawer to see a little sandy coloured bunny staring up at her, and she reaches in to have the bunny nudge itself against her hand. There’s just a hint of a smile on her usually stoic face as she sits down and Pepper coos over the little creature.

“For Pepper and Phil, I thought some live office decorations were in order,” Loki explains, and hands a bowl of brightly coloured guppies to Pepper, and a tank with two terrapins in it to Phil.

“Brother!” Thor enthuses, his broad face lit with excitement. “Do I receive anything as well?” Loki rolls his eyes.

“Of course you do,” he says, removing yet another drawer and handing it to Steve. “You’ll get yours last.” 

“These are adorable, but I don’t know what they are,” remarks Steve, and they all laugh at Steve staring, puzzled, into his container.

“They’re guinea pigs,” Loki says, and then removes a drawer that’s squealing. 

“That does not bode well,” Bruce says, his brow furrowed at the sound that is faintly disturbing. 

“Don’t worry, Bruce. They’re absolutely harmless.” Bruce lets out a very, very faint squeal to match the sounds coming from within when he sees what’s inside (even though he’ll deny it to his dying day). There are five tiny Roborovski hamsters running around staring up at his face from the cage inside the drawer, and Bruce can feel his heart melting for the little things.

“Wait, what do I get?” Tony asks, frowning. “I don’t take care of animals very well.”

“That’s true, we had to wean you off your disastrous coffee and antacids,” jokes Steve, bumping Tony’s elbow gently with his own. 

“I got you this,” Loki announces proudly, and Clint looks up from his puppy to facepalm. The smack of his forehead against his palm is audible as everyone stares at the row of baby cacti that Loki has set out on the coffee table.

“Well, they live without your care,” defends Loki. “You don’t need to water them, and I even got you a transparent plastic box with holes in the lid to house these prickly plants. You won’t be able to impale yourself if you trip over the thing.”

“You are most thoughtful, Brother,” Thor exclaims, and pulls Loki in for a bone-crushing hug until Loki pokes him in the ribs to make him let go.

“And finally, Thor and I have kittens,” he pronounces, and unceremoniously deposits a black kitten in Thor’s lap.

“Hello!” Thor booms, holding up the sleepy kitten in his giant paws, and it’s a credit to the tiny animal that it doesn’t react adversely. In fact, it just yawns, paws ineffectually at Thor’s hands, and then pees on him. 

“I shall name you Loki!” Thor says with all the pride of a new parent holding his new child, even as all the other Avengers are laughing and Pepper has grabbed tissues to mop up the mess.

“I won’t name you Thor,” Loki confides in his own calico tabby. He scratches its head with one finger while it sprawls on his bony shoulder, and it meows in delight.

“Loki, do you volunteer at the animal shelter about seven blocks away?” Phil asks, one hand holding Clint’s, the other being licked by a very enthusiastic puppy.

“Why yes, I do,” Loki says archly, one eyebrow nearly reaching his hairline. “Most impressive work, Phil.”

“It was a little hard,” Phil confesses, and the rest laugh or cough to hide their laughs, because when is finding things out hard for Phil? The man should just leave to set up his own detective agency and be the Sherlock Holmes of this century.

“Well, all I had to go on was you all saying that Loki smelled funny when he came home,” Phil says, a tad of a complaining tone creeping into his voice, but his face is smiling, and his hand is now stroking the little bulldog’s back while the fellow slobbers at Clint’s hand.

“They had animals that needed places to go,” explains Loki. “And if we could set up a shelter for LGBTQ youth that needed somewhere to stay or somewhere to seek help, I figured that we could take in some pets of our own.”

“This is perfect,” Natasha says, and in an uncharacteristic move, she puts her rabbit down and moves over to hug him. All the other Avengers follow her cue and go over and mob Loki, smothering him in hugs.

Loki has never felt more at home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodbye, my lover. Goodbye, my friend~ Okay, I love James Blunt's voice. But really, this is the damn end. Goodbye! :/   
> Goodbye, may we meet again! :)


End file.
